Itty Bitty Apps are hiring mid-level Android devs....

# australia

[Tim Malseed]

Itty Bitty Apps are hiring mid-level Android devs. Lots of opportunities for modern Kotlin & Compose dev.
https://www.seek.com.au/job/56767566

[michaelv]

any KMP projects?

[Tim Malseed]

None that I know of, unfortunately. I do a bit of KMP on my personal projects - but the teams are generally very native-focussed, so I’m not sure how much room there is for KMP.

[michaelv]

KMP is native though. if you share UI then it’s starting to get less native but that’s optional.

[Tim Malseed]

It is and it isn’t. If you’re an iOS dev, then writing code in Kotlin isn’t what you’d call native development. Even if the code ends up the same.

[Tim Malseed]

I’m an advocate for KMP. But getting buy-in from iOS developers is probably the biggest hurdle.

[Tim Malseed]

If a Swift tool came along and I was asked to start building parts of my Android applications in Swift, I wouldn’t be super excited by it

[michaelv]

true but that’s like saying that the backend needs to be native ios. this is just my POV since the shared logic should be platform agnostic for the most part. But I get what you mean.

[michaelv]

if swift was doing what Kotlin was doing I would be open to using swift instead. however so far I still prefer Kotlin and it would never really be the same anyway since objective c is not used in backends all over the world. whereas java is and hence you can add kotlin and have “kotlin everywhere”. I’m finding some ios devs becoming more open to it as they see it’s far better than react native and other options. businesses seem to want to do some sort of cross platform. I feel that’s where it’s headed one way or another. it’s only alpha though so early days. and the swift calling suspend functions is not super nice yet.

[Tim Malseed]

I think KMP has a purpose, but it’s not for every project. Some projects the iOS and Android apps are built in parallel, some are fast-follow, and others are only built on one platform. Sometimes you have a really lean team working on multiple platforms, and other times you have a ton of members working on a single platform.

So, it really just depends on the project, the client, the size of the team, budget and a bunch of other stuff.

[michaelv]

for sure it always depends. that’s one of the strengths of KMP though is that it’s super flexible. but yeah sometimes it’s not required at all if every one is ok with doing “full native”. I get the mentality.

[Tim Malseed]

I really do like KMP and I would genuinely love to be using it at work. But the more purely-iOS devs you have involved, the more overhead there is in everyone learning it. And then it’s still pretty new, and I know in my experience there are tons of sharp edges and things you can really sink your time into. It’s just another potential point of failure I guess. I know I sounds like I’m against KMP 😅 If I had a small team building a greenfield iOS & Android project then I would definitely push for KMP.

And, on top of all that, we all love KMP because we all love Kotlin. But Swift devs love Swift, so it’s not such an obvious choice for them (I think). Not that I’ve really talked to any iOS devs using KMP

[michaelv]

nah I totally get where you’re coming from. all good 🙂

[michaelv]

I’m just so over the ios and android. I look forward to a world of “mobile devs”. I try not to get attached to things. I’m learning ios too.

[Tim Malseed]

Haha. Yeah, I do both iOS and Android and I’m a bit the same - I like to think of myself as a software engineer rather than a mobile developer

[michaelv]

I also use an iphone as my daily driver as I love the apple watch and android watches still suck.

[Tim Malseed]

Yeah, I wonder if the Pixel Watch will be any good. I chop and change a bit, I’m going back to iOS later this year - my last iPhone was a 6s

[Tim Malseed]

It sounds like we’re in a similar position. It’s tricky - I haven’t done solid iOS dev for about 18 months and I feel waay behind. I missed all the Combine stuff, now SwiftUI is out, and there’s some nonsense about sendable that seems confusing.

So, I like to be multi-disciplined, but I also want to be an expert - very hard to be both.

[michaelv]

I think of my self as software engineer more broadly but currently I’m only really working on mobile apps so it’s more specific. Like technically I could think of myself as a biological neural net but it’s not very helpful in terms of helping someone else understand what I do day to day at the present time.

[michaelv]

it’s hard to learn both but they’re getting more and more similar over time and with KMP you can get ever closer to managing both on your own.

[Tim Malseed]

I could think of myself as a biological neural net

lol