Mobile Development Careers

Why Mobile Application Development as career?
Mobile applications developments will be the “next big thing” for IT professionals in the US. Here’s why:

Increased Hiring/ Mobile Priority
Mobile was described as one of the top three priorities in technology hiring by 35 percent of employers. A year from now, as more companies incorporate mobile technology, this number will be closer to 50 percent.

Companies need app developers as the market for mobile software surges to $17.5 billion by 2012, from $4.1 billion last year. The demand for programmers who can write for mobile platforms, such as Apple's iPhone, Google's Android, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry, has gone up significantly in the last few years. See how mobile development stacks up against Java and .NET in the graphs below.

Job growth in mobile development

Job portals such Dice has more than 1000 job listings requiring skills or experience with the iPhone, or Android skills. The number of jobs that require iPhone skills or Android skills, is still pretty small, but the growth rate in mobile application development field is huge.

The bottom line is mobile communications is a growing industry. Today's 3 billion mobile phone users outnumber both Internet users and land-line owners. That already huge number has nowhere to go but up. On top of that, each user will demand more from their phones as prices for phone-based Net access drop and data pipes from the Net to phones widen. The mobile landscape is going to change significantly over the next few years, and software developers are going to be the agents of that change.

Lastly, there isn’t going to be one dominant operating system. What we have already is a fragmented market, which is great for developers. Current viable operating systems (and who’s to say there won’t be more?) are iOS (Apple), Android (Google), Blackberry OS 6 (RIM), Symbian (Nokia), Palm OS (HP), and Windows 7 Mobile (Microsoft).

All of these systems need apps, which by definition are not interchangeable from one OS to another. Furthermore, they aren’t even necessarily interchangeable from one phone to another. As phones come out with different functionality and/or technical specifications, it requires that, at a minimum, applications must be tested to see if they will work on the new phones. If they don’t, then additional development is required.

Why is mobile development a good career for new grads?The obvious question is where the developers will come from. The obvious answer is that they will come from the existing pool of developers, whether they are new grads entering the workforce, people already doing mobile app development, or existing developers in other industries who decide to make a transition into mobile application development. Existing developers are usually reluctant to do the transition from one field to another, this makes this new field extremely attractive to new graduates.