How is AI/LLMs affecting app development? what has changed in App Development in the past 2-5 years? What does a career in only app development look like nowadays?
Thank you!
It's not as dire as you might think. To software developers, the "AI revolution" is largely what the "desktop publishing revolution" was to designers. Yes, it meant the "riff raff" could theoretically play with the pros. Some percentage of the riff raff became pros. Most of the pros eventually adopted the tools and techniques used by the riff raff. Some of the pros didn't survive the transition and happily retired, taking their rubylith, Letraset type, and rubber cement with them.
The silver lining is that most of a software engineer's job isn't coding, it's thinking. LLMs can't do that, and we're not getting to AGI with current AI architectures. LLMs can amplify thinking, and an LLM in the hands of a software engineer or architect is at least two orders of magnitude more effective than it can be in the hands of a vibe coder. As LLMs get better for vibe coders, they also get better for pros.
One can argue that, by the end of the decade, hand-coded [your language of choice] may be considered as unnecessary as hand-coded assembly has been for decades. But coding in modern languages is already 7-8 levels of abstraction above the metal. One more level of abstraction is not the death of software engineering, IMO.
But those layers are pretty much deterministic. I think that's the qualitative difference.
The fear for me comes with that initial creation, which is a fear i have across a large amount of things for AI "disruption". Just floods of bad products at rates that are insane, same type of problem that exists on github of just garbage prs, and same thing for any reddit/twitter/even hn type comment thread.
A lot of modern languages are still source -> IR -> binary
The app itself is fairly straightforward, but it included some intermediate complexity in terms of audio capture and calling local models. Both something I'd never done, and as not-a-mac dev something I probably wouldn't have attempted for a side-project while I'm meant to be bootstrapping my own thing.
I didn't touch a line of code, and I was blown away. I'm so impressed in fact that I'm predicting we'll see a resurgence in native apps in the near future. By far the worst (and slowest) part of the process is having to deal with the App Store, and the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to get past review.
There will be consolidation all over the place. Expect government services to take over and control things that were once private.
React made simple webapps a case of just gluing dependencies together and much more approachable to a generalist developer than the previous generation of web development was. But native apps weren’t affected in the same way. With AI I suspect we’ll see a lot of simple apps, the ones that really aren’t doing much other than CRUD operations on a remote API, become very heavily AI generated by generalist developers.
But there will still remain a healthy market for working on considerably more complex apps.
> What is going on in the world of pure IOS/Android app development?
I'll speak only for Android.
I am tired of Google breaking source compatibility with every AndroidX release and remaining on outdated IntelliJ Platform versions in Android Studio.
not too long ago, Google released AGP 9.0, which was a SHOCKWAVE for many Android projects. many compiler plugins' compatibility, including Google's own Protobuf Gradle plugin, took very long to adapt. also, Kotlin Multiplatform received so much damage that a month after release, JetBrains themselves released an AGP 9.0 migration video on YouTube.
and then we have MDC-Android (Views) v. Compose tension. MDC-Android got Material 3 and M3 Expressive components much faster than Compose, and for many you still have to be on alpha Compose Material3 releases... which are more stable than "Stable," somehow. Compose is nice, but I'd swap Material for something else ASAP or use Compose Foundation directly.
> How is AI/LLMs affecting app development?
you have more useless buttons in Android Studio. or, if you are a paying IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate user, you can have Android support in IDEA, which enables ACP agents without sacrificing proper Android support. IDEA Android plugin lags behind AGP upgrades a little, though, but it's fine.
oh, and, you can vibecode Android apps in Google AI Studio with streaming from a Google-hosted device, all without Android Studio.
> what has changed in App Development in the past 2-5 years?
2 years? a lot. 5 years? the world turned upside down! Compose got Stable release 4 years ago.
> What does a career in only app development look like nowadays?
very discouraging. everyone just prefers React "Native". I couldn't find an Android job in two years because it's nowhere to apply to in Ukraine and just recently switched to .NET. guess what? less than a few weeks passed after I updated my Djinni and now I have a few interviews on the next week.
It also supports the 'native is better' apprpach. For example, I recently started with Powerflow [0] which I really like except for the size of it, and created a Swift version [1] in an hour of Claude plus manual tweaks. It's been running quietly on my laptop ever since.
The downside is that it brings Apple's iOS restrictions into sharper relief: being able to easily write widgets and apps to suit my needs but then being unable to run then for longer than a week on my own hardware without paying $99 a year is especially frustrating.
[0] https://github.com/lzt1008/powerflow [1] https://github.com/Tom1827/powerflow-swift
I finally just got an Android app shipped to the Play Store for https://wordtrak.com, after several weeks of back and forth with what I am assuming are mostly robots managing the Google side of this. I was stunned to see how far Android distribution has come (and especially that all changes are now reviewed).
What I was most surprised by though, was all of the ridiculous red tape around the actual process of getting an app listed. Best example: I had to confirm I didn't change the outcome of the Korean War in order to list on Play Store in Korea.
In any case I got most of this done with Claude and expo.dev - it was a huge relief to let Claude Code churn through this and not have to worry about spending months re-learning frameworks and ecosystems.
When I mention developer communities, I have my platform with more than 300,000 people signed up on it, so you can consider my experience to be valid
In fact, throughout my 14 years career in backend development and engineering, I have been eagerly awaiting something -- like the LLMs -- that would envolve the application development.
As I feel that the most tedious and boring part of backend application development is "translating" business logic into technical code—and this happens to be precisely where LLMs excel. This does not means that writing code is invaluable or is no longer necessary; it simply means that this particular task no longer must be performed by humans personally.
I suspect most people would agree that LLMs do not represent the ultimate path to AGI. Given this, why should we fear LLMs rather than embracing them? What exactly are we afraid of? After all, the tasks that LLMs are capable of handling are merely those that are most tedious and dull for humans.
Yet, ultimately, who is it that defines and validates the software application ? The answer remains: humans!
To enable humans to fully exercise their judgment and decision-making capabilities, while entrusting those tedious, monotonous daily tasks to LLMs—is this not precisely the tremendous boon we have been hoping for?
I know this is easier said than done—hard to accept. Yet, developers need a job to earn a living and support their families.
In this day and age, if one focuses exclusively on App development, what exactly do the career prospects look like?
When it comes to the field of App development, I believe that the role and very essence of developers are poised to undergo a radical transformation. We should no longer limit ourselves to merely translating business logic into code; instead, we ought to pursue our niche—specifically, those tasks that rely primarily on judgment and creativity.
We built iOS first because that's what most of our users have, though the team is mostly on Android.
We built our logic in Rust, so that compiles cross platform. It's really just the UI layer that is per platform.
Though I had initially written our first demo in React-Native, the team wanted to go with native UI.
Lately we've been talking about moving the timeline for our Android app up because we can get AI to help using the iOS app as a foundation.
I haven't seen anything really new and compelling in iOS/Android land. The promise of right once run anywhere continues to be a promise, and the bluetooth libraries across different devices (particularly in Android land) has me concerned.
The market is saturated for new apps.
The hard part of this app is great design, requiring intentionally designed workflows and lots of real world testing. The code isn't the interesting part and now code isn't taking most of my time. It's great!
Once the design is nailed down and workflows tightened up, I don't expect much active development and can focus on distribution and marketing.
As a solo dev, this feels totally doable but ask me in 6 months.
Other than LLMs the biggest change has been moving to Kotlin Compose from the old Android XML-based layout system.
LLMs are something I use often now and I'm not thrilled about this but it is what it is. I'm one of those people who prefer to hand craft code in a deep flow state so the move to LLMs has made me enjoy my job less, but it is hard to argue against the productivity gains so I try to be grateful that there was a long period where what I enjoyed doing and getting paid for were so well aligned. It isn't like my job is horrible now, it is just not quite as fun.
While I use agentic AI quite a bit, I don't "vibe code". Much of the software I currently write falls under various medical compliance systems (FDA, EMA, etc) and they rightfully expect us to understand and be personally responsible for the quality of the code we produce. Even absent the regulations, I still find it absolutely wild people ship code (associated with their name in any way) without looking at it.
I've been working for the same company for the past 5 years so I have little idea of how the career/interview side of things have changed recently. From anecdotal reports it seems like a giant mess of ghost jobs and competing with massive piles of AI-generated and AI-filtered resumes these days unless you have a strong network from the before times.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be worried about discoverability, I'm sure AI has made that worse but it was already a huge problem to get random apps noticed even before AI. The apps I currently work on professionally support external hardware devices that the apps control via bluetooth, so app store discoverability isn't a big concern (you buy the external device, then the documentation points you to the app store downloads).
I have also done app development as a non-commercial side project, writing a PvP game/stat tracking app for the game Destiny 2, this is a free app that has about a thousand users on iOS and a few hundred on Android, written in Kotlin Multiplatform. That started pre-LLM and I've continued to avoid using LLMs while working on it to make sure I can remember how to code sans LLMs, though the fact that Destiny 2 is stopping new development as of June 9th means I'm unlikely to put much effort into it going forward.
As an Android developer, KMP is the bigger development. It seems mature enough now that if I want to build an app as a single dev I feel confident that I could get the iOS version out at the same time. They seem to be avoiding the mistakes of Xamarin and Flutter
AI is useless when developing with Maui, as it's too new of a development framework for any AI's knowledgebase to have a clue what to do with it.
Mostly for fun/scratch my own itch, and using AI as a companion/helper device.
Open, for example, Reddit, and check the SideProject channel. I counted 1 application per 2 minutes! This is huge! And a lot of it is bad quality, because people have no technical and UI/UX skills. They don't know what architecture, MVC, code review, retrospective, technical documentation, target group, performance, hashing of password, and a lot a lot of things really EXISTS.
Even if you make something cool and stable, you just can't popup! And that's the current state. Too much noise!
This is both good and bad. We get more new stuff, people enjoy creating these websites, but they risk themselves and others people in the process. Like a kid being allowed to drive a partly autonomous car.
The super annoying thing I have encountered are managers and other low technical people with some influence over engineers that now believe they ”know the limitations of AI” because they managed to make a CRUD demo in 30min. More than once have someone in my vicinity expected claude to one shot an algorithm that might be physically impossible to even do. I have also seen people try to ”prove” that it is possible by having claude make this algorithm on some toy example where the output looks okay at first glance, but with no verification that it is actually correct. And now the engineers ”just need to take it to production”. AI have made any professional software development 100x worse in my experience. Annoying people that previously could be convinced that certain things are not quick and easy are now extra stubborn, extra annoying, extra time consuming to deal with. Therefore, in my professional life, AI is a big net negative when it comes to efficient use of time. AI made all bad things worse, and barely brought anything good with it. I am convinced that it doesn’t have to be like this, but most organizations are dysfunctional to some level, and that just became worse. If I could go back in time, I would not have gone into software engineering. I love the field, but there is just too much BS going on.
I also see and hear about tiny teams being more effective than ever, teams that already have the skills to know what they are building, and how. They can ship more, faster, and still ensure reliability because they know what they are doing, and they are allowed to spend the time if needed to ensure things are done correctly (without AI powered ”managers” standing in their way).
I think we will see many small companies literally come out of nowhere, no funding, no big names behind them and completely crush companies 1000x their size because of AI. I also believe big slow organizations will use AI to become less efficient and ship worse products while panicking on their way down, ensuring ”all in on AI” by sending more emails faster than ever.
More easy problems will be solved than ever, every imaginable easy problem will be possible for anyone to solve. The hard novel problems will remain unsolved, remain difficult and only the smartest, most stubborn, most stupid people will attempt to solve them, and if they do, the market will reward them.
Anytime I let lose AI (Both Codex and Claude), they end up producing slop that is overcomplicated, and that looks like a generic tutorial interface. Great for toy apps but not for serious one.
When I do most of the architecture, and use AI to 'fill in the blanks' or just finish some functionality here and there, then AI is great.
The main reason is that it is trained by public code that is mostly tutorials, and simple apps, so AI can't build a great looking one by itself (or it doesn't how to do large apps). But for specific features, it is great.
TLDR: It is still a 'fill in the funcionality here' type of help. Folks that are successful with letting 'multiple agents' running in the background are mostly for backend work where the results are easier to verify.
Also, there is a lot of LARPING in twitter sphere exaggerating what AI can realistically do right now. But I can see how it can affect entry level jobs. AI is still like an CS intern, or very very junior engineer.