Does Android have a long-term future in the industry?

Yes, I do think Android has a long term future (more details in video). Specifically within Amazon, I think Android is core to where they'll see the most growth as a company: in developing regions such as India. In addition, I imagine a lot of the hardware efforts for Amazon have some overlap with Android technology. So even if Amazon stops investing in Android, you'll be well-equipped to have impact on these other team.

Does Android have good prospects in tech going forward?

I'm biased obviously, but I 100% believe it does. Android is simply too big to go away with its ~3 billion active devices. Mobile is a duopoly between Android and iOS, and as long as Apple products remain extremely expensive for the average non-American person, Android will continue having a massive presence within the market.

On a related note, how does it correlate to future opportunities and growth within Amazon?

Amazon is a bit funky as they probably have the least truly native mobile development among FAANG companies, but there's still a lot of opportunity there I'm sure. Amazon also makes hardware that runs AOSP underneath like Fire and Echo devices, which is a gold mine of technical growth and scope for native Android engineers (caveat: Amazon is probably deprioritizing these after the layoffs though).

Zooming out, you just learn a lot of good engineering fundamentals doing Android in general as you deal with so many edge cases naturally, especially at Big Tech:

• Tons of device variety with different specs and screen sizes
• Need to account for 5+ prior major OS versions at least
• Random jank that phone manufacturers add since they all fork Android before deploying it on their phones

If you are truly striving to be a good Android engineer, you will become a good software engineer overall. The instincts you build up while dealing with natural Android jank is truly invaluable.

For more resources about Android:

• "How can I get really good at Android?"
• "Advice or resources on creating quality mobile applications?"
• "Android (Kotlin) vs. React Native"

Having worked at Amazon, I can certainly answer your question.

For the first part - Android does possess a good future if you work in a company or an app that is mobile-first, like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Uber, etc.

From my understanding, Amazon doesn't have a strong mobile engineering foundation for most of its apps. Having worked as an Android engineer at Amazon, I could sense a bias in career development compared to folks working in different domains. However, there is definitely a lot to learn if you end up working on one of their native, mobile-first Android apps like Amazon Audible, Prime Video, or IMDB.

I was lucky to work in Amazon Care (which no longer exists), where the app was built natively and with the most modern tech stack. I could tell that I received a strong foundation in Android engineering that catered to millions of people.