Why are people not considering mobile development a good career path anymore?
I've been noticing a lot of people saying that mobile development is not a good career path anymore, and I'm curious why (I know that the moment is not good overall, but the feeling with mobile community seems to be worse).
I've been working in mobile for about 7 years, and honestly, mobile has always felt like a niche market to me. In my experience, mobile teams are usually much smaller than backend or web teams, and hiring has always seemed cyclical. There are periods where recruiters contact me more often, and other periods where I barely get any messages.
I do agree that some things have changed. AI will probably reduce team sizes in some companies, at least initially, and it's becoming much harder to make money as a solo developer by publishing an app on the App Store or Google Play.
At the same time, mobile is still the primary platform for billions of users. Younger generations seem to spend much more time on smartphones than on PCs, and most major B2C products still depend heavily on mobile apps. Banking, social media, e-commerce, transportation, food delivery, streaming, and many other industries are still mobile-first.
Even though the market has matured, I don't think that means it has stopped evolving. New players can still emerge, just like TikTok did, and to me this means that mobile teams will still be needed and demand can increase.
Additionally, I feel there is room fore mobile careers to gradually expand in other areas such as platform engineering.