Some of you already know this, but I write an Android focused newsletter called "Dispatch". It's been a fantastic forcing function for me to write more and share the things that I find interesting.
As part of the latest issue, I reached out to a few Android experts and asked them all an important question -
"Where do you see Android Development in three years, and how do you think developers should prepare for that future?"
It'll be an understatement to say that the lineup was stacked. Take a look-
- Gabriel Peal (Software Engineer @ OpenAI)
- Stacy Devino (Sr Staff @ Fanatics)
- Ty Smith (Principal Eng @ Uber — Advisor, Investor, Founder & GDE)
- Kaushik Gopal (Principal Engineer @ Instacart)
- P-Y (Android @ Block, Inc.)
- Tasha Ramesh (Staff Engineer @ Tinder)
- Ryan Harter (Staff Engineer @ Dropbox | GDE for Kotlin & Android | Hardware Hacking)
- Allie Ogden (Mobile Department @ Swappa)
- Vishnu Rajeevan (Freelance Android Developer)
- Mike Wolfson (GDE for Android | Technology Enthusiast | Lead Android Dev @ Target)
This crew shared a bunch of fun hot-takes, insights, wishes and predictions.
It's a particularly interesting time for the Android ecosystem so I was really curious to hear all the diverse perspectives. Moreover, some of us have a front seat at seeing how the recent changes in the technological landscape are changing our day-to-day. Some are even helping enable that change.
The reason this is relevant is because it was the topic we anchored on as part of the latest episode of the Fragmented Podcast. I was honored to hang out with my friend Kaushik to discuss the future of Android and just shoot the breeze.
We coverd a lot of ground on the episode so I encourage you to give it a listen.
There was one question in particular that Kaushik asked me that's worth sharing here.
"Are there some opinions that you think were not covered by anyone, that you’d want to put out there?"
Here are some of my raw notes that I put together to answer this question. I figured I'll just share them here as well since I think they might be interesting to some of my readers. I highly recommend giving the episode a listen to get the full context.
- There will be some catastrophic errors introduced due to “vibe coding” in the short term. There will be some huge incident that we’ll learn about and it will be because someone accepted an auto-generated code snippet and shipped it.
- Existing patterns will have an outsized impact on adoption. This is because existing data has a huge influence on the code that LLMs recommend and I wonder if this will have implications. I suspect this is why it does a much better job generating React/Python code - because a lot more of it is available on the internet. It also means existing open source libraries will continue to be more popular and their adoption will only grow. LLMs do have a bias towards existing patterns and will only amplify its preferences.
- I think the way we interview will probably change too. Onsite interviews will make a huge comeback since the tools already available have gotten really creative.
- There’s a big chance that StackOverflow might not even exist 3 years from now or will become a thing that you rarely need to visit. A lot of us are already there. Crazy to think about that given how much we relied on it in the past.
- Engineers who do end up getting hired will ramp up a lot quicker in a bunch of different code bases due to tools available to help you ramp up. Full stack engineering will become a lot more prevalent since the barriers to entry continue to become lower. People can do a lot more with a $20 subscription.
- The need for basic apps will significantly reduce. A vast majority of apps that you download for single-time use will not have a market anymore. This is because Generative UI will be more prevalent and all the top AI products will be able to cater to this use case effectively (in fact it already does).
- The word “agents” will become part of our day-to-day. In the next 3 years, every single employee in your company would have interacted with at least one agent in some capacity. Whether it was for IT or for writing some code, they will start playing a role in your company. You will notice a lot more automated PRs being generated where your job will be to just review and approve it, just to be sure. This is primarily a transition period thing, before we form opinions and start feeling confident about auto-merging changes.
- Everyone will have their own personal clippy that knows everything about me and my life and preferences. This will encompass not just software engineering related preferences but also my preferences in general so that I don’t have to repeat myself over and over again.