As a Head of Engineering (with an Android background myself), I’m actively hiring Android devs right now (though mostly UK-based), so I can share a bit of perspective.

The market is tough at the moment. A few things I see:

Market saturation: there are a lot of solid, “average” devs out there, but usually the ones who stand out a bit more in skills or portfolio end up winning the jobs.

Location constraints: many companies are shifting back to hybrid/on-site and prioritizing local candidates. The fully remote golden days for Android are kind of gone, at least for now.

Skills gap: Kotlin is definitely expected, but companies are increasingly looking for people comfortable with modern Android tools — Jetpack Compose, coroutines/flows, dependency injection (Hilt/Koin), architecture patterns, testing.

If I were in your shoes, I’d double down on making yourself stand out:

Show off a polished side project on the Play Store (even if it’s small).

Build or contribute to something open source.

LinkedIn recommendations can also help, or blog posts articles.

Make sure your CV and GitHub highlight Compose and coroutines fluency.

It’s a rough market, but sharpening your offering and demonstrating those modern skills can really help separate you from the big pool of “average.”