Ask Slashdot: Preparing For the 'App Bubble' To Pop? 240
Niris writes "I am currently a senior in computer science, and am expecting to graduate in December. I have an internship lined up in Android development with medium sized company that builds apps for much larger corporations, and I have recently begun a foray into iOS development. So far my experience with Android ranges from a small mobile game (basically Asteroids), a Japanese language study aid, and a fairly large mobile app for a local non-profit that uses RSS feeds, Google Cloud Messaging and various APIs. I have also recently started working with some machine learning algorithms and sensors/the ADK to start putting together a prototype for a mobile business application for mobile inspectors. My question: is my background diverse enough that I don't have to worry about finding a job if all the predictions that the 'app bubble' will pop soon come true? Is there another, similar area of programming that I should look into in order to have some contingencies in place if things go south? My general interests and experience have so far been in mobile app development with Java and C++ (using the NDK), and some web development on both the client and server side. Thank you!"
Re:Is there an app bubble? (Score:5, Informative)
OK, so there was a .com bubble, that burst about the year 2000. So web developers haven't had any jobs for the last dozen years.
Except they have. Apart from the general world wide woes of a poor economy since 2008, web developers are still developing. There might have been a tech stock bubble, that made a bunch of people very rich over a short time, and then most of them very poor again. But the internet didn't go away. And nearly every business needs a presence.
As to the intern, he shouldn't worry. App development isn't going away, and even if it did the skills are very transferable.
Re:Is there an app bubble? (Score:5, Informative)
Think back to that dot-com bubble. What actually dried up? Wasn't it the get-rich-quick VC money thrown at startups? The demand for the product (web sites) didn't go away. Just the retarded pie-in-the-sky, brain-dead ideas and money-grubbing schemers. Those with a working business model (Amazon? Google?) are still around and are stronger than ever.
Fast forward to the latest bubble (mobile apps), and you'll soon find the same story. There's a bubble: everybody and their dog jumped on the mobile app bandwagon back in 2008. That bubble was short-lived, but it started a larger bubble. Now, think back to pre-dot-com days. There was a small bubble in the mid/late 90's, then there was the huge bubble in 1999 and 2000. We're riding that huge bubble right now. This too shall pop.
It only takes a quick glance at the Play Store to realize that there are a shit-ton of shitty apps made by sketchy companies that probably won't exist in a year. Most of them have manuals (and text resources) in Engrish.
Note to foreign developers: if you want me to load your app onto my phone (presumably for your profit), learn proper grammar and spelling for my language or hire someone who already knows it. My mom plays a Bejeweled clone that tells her "no more move" when she's run out of moves.
Thus, a bubble. And these developers will be looking for other work soon. (And before you label me a xenophobe, I don't even claim to speak anything other than en-US. Note that. I don't claim to, much less represent that as a professional skill.)
Put your skills to use and build a portfolio. (Score:2, Informative)
Stop worrying about the "app bubble" and build yourself a portfolio of working products.
In my case, I registered a .com address with my name and built a nice and easy to navigate website that showcases my finished products (complete with videos screen capped from the device simulators), audio and visual works, experiments, etc. For each thing I generally wrote down a little blurb about how I arrived at the results I attained, why I decided to do specific things and sometimes how I achieved my end goals (you have to be very careful not to divulge your techniques though).
The decision to hoist up my own website as my professional portfolio was probably the single most career-changing thing I ever did as a freelance programmer/graphcis designer/musician. Almost instantly, people stopped asking me for paper qualifications and prodding my history and started hiring me simply because they liked what they saw and I'm a nice person to work with. More often then not, someone will come to me with an idea and pick out something from my portfolio and ask me if I can make it as awesome as that. I'll typically say that I can adapt the design aspects they like to better fit their idea for a product, and off we go on a business contract together. I've even had a few offers for jobs from some local studios and one game development company. All of this came through my portfolio website.
So really, the best thing you can do is demonstrate your own skills by assembling a portfolio of things other people can see. If you can do that, then it doesn't really matter if the app bubble bursts. You'll have completed a few projects that you can showcase as a testament to your own abilities, and since a lot of stuff like C++ programming is cross platform you can use your portfolio as an augment to your own CV (or a straight out replacement).
No need to panic (Score:4, Informative)
The only real bubble is that companies like Yahoo are willing to pay lots of money for one-app companies with very little tangible value. You should only really be concerned if your plan is to try to make money by creating your own app and selling it to a megacorp.
Where the money is for mobile developers is not making apps themselves, but making apps for businesses that want apps to further their non-app-related goals. It's similar to websites in the 90s - while a few outliers were people making money on websites they were building for themselves, most web developers were making money by building websites for companies to achieve their other business goals.
I've been doing mobile development for over four years now, and this whole time I've been expecting hordes of developers to descend on the market and give me a lot more competition. It doesn't seem to be happening - demand for mobile developers is still far outpacing supply. It will be a good field to be in for years to come. Eventually the mobile developer market will be saturated, but this took a decade for websites, and the people who were any good didn't care because they had the time to build up loads of experience and put themselves at the top of their field.
If you find that you do need to shift your career path, you can generalise quite easily - Java is still widely used in other areas such as server-side web development, and Objective-C will let you write native OS X applications. Generally speaking, if you can handle mobile development, you can handle desktop development with ease.