I was a Project Manager, studied my a$$ off at 38 to become a mobile developer. Built production apps in Java, React Native. I've studied Kotlin and Flutter. Then my company almost went belly up and I had to scramble to find a job to support my family. Back to being a PM which I hate. Started with Swift because my son is old enough to play with Swift Playgrounds and thinking about making a break back into dev. Every post I see on Twitter is about Flutter, maybe RN, but not much Native iOS. Is it wrong that I'm loving it thus far? What's the future for Native iOS and Android developers?

The future of native app mobile development is good. Don't worry about it for now

If you really like being a Developer, that's what should focus on

Flutter seems to ignore iOS and other platform bugs. Not even Google themselves use it for anything important. Native seems to do just fine.

What is 'native' anyways?

E.g. on Android there's the official SDK (Java, Kotlin) and the NDK (C, C++). So the latter is native and the former is not? And then there's react native, which has native in the name so surely it is native, right?

Also see this excellent rant tweet:
https://twitter.com/JakeWharton/...

But the future for 'official' platform developers is still bright, because any nontrivial app needs some interaction with the host system that is just a pita to develop without the official APIs.

Note that mobile development is much more than just the programming part on top of Android or iOS APIs. There are many interesting and complex aspects that generally don't apply to web/backend development, or at least differently. Things like version control: how do you keep your app's UX acceptable if a user never updates your app? You need to think about forward and backward compatibility much more with mobile development. That's just one example where 'native' mobile devs usually have better experience than web hipsters that only know that their hipsterscript will be magically deployed every night so that only the latest versions of their unicorn software can fart rainbow bugs in their faces.

Wow, thanks for the detailed response. You make good points.