Application vs middleware development in Android [closed]

Question

I have 1 year and 6 months of experience on Android. All of my experience has been into application development. Recently I have got offers from two companies. One is offering me a profile to work on application layer and other is offering a profile on Android middleware. Can you guide me which would be better.Is middleware development better than application layer development from the career perspective in terms of money and other opportunities. Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

Both has its own pros and cons, thats for sure. One thing to emphasize is though middleware is into server-side programming. Client side is nice and cool at the moment, but five years from now, i am sure Android will have totally different looks, different tooling, different UX paradigms, different API's. So the skillset you develop by doing client work will need a magnitude more effort to update, and new developers just starting will catch your experience level very quickly in such dynamic environment. On the server side, the concepts of design patterns, scalability principles and other stuff will help you develop your expertise in a much stronger way against the technology changes and new developers. Don't get me wrong, server side is not easier, it gets a similar amount of effort, but the erosion is smaller compared to client side techs. What you learn and add to your arsenal will not be useless in a short time. I would go for the server side if you are into architecture and alike. You can still keep doing stuff on the client platforms...

(An architect/developer with around ten years of experience on both sides of the story)