Here is the deal. You want a good mobile app developer, find a good coder, and train him/help him learn.
As dinedal noted, it is slow going, as it is outside his day job.
There used to be a time where employers would recognize an employee's abilities, and provide for his learning of new subject matter.
Sadly, today, you either have to be able to demonstrate the knowledge out of the gate, or be damned.
There are plenty of good developers who could easily immerse themselves in mobile app development for two weeks, and become pretty skilled mobile devs in little time.
> There are plenty of good developers who could easily immerse themselves in mobile app development for two weeks, and become pretty skilled mobile devs in little time.
It takes more than learning a programming language to become anywhere close to being a good mobile developer. The technical issues such as slow processor, little memory and network interruptions aside, you also have to deal with a usage behavior and human interface which is very different to all desktop application and most web applications. If someone was to ask me for steps to mobile enlightenment, I would probably point him to the human interface guidelines fist:
> There used to be a time where employers would recognize an employee's abilities, and provide for his learning of new subject matter.
This is wishful thinking and I don't believe was ever the case (or maybe before I was born). If I ever wanted to expand my knowledge in a certain direction, I always took it as my own responsibility to ask and demand for it. The company can provide you the resources and learning opportunities, but you have to grab them yourself.
"There are plenty of good developers who could easily immerse themselves in mobile app development for two weeks, and become pretty skilled mobile devs in little time."
-- That's not true at all. It takes a lot more time to learn a platform well, and know how to tackle mobile client side problems especially coming from the server side.
Nobody will let you close to their production code without some bit of experience as you are more likely to fuck up things. It is very easy to introduce bugs on a client, and there are no unit tests to help you out on tricky things such as deadlocks.
Also the fact that you are not learning on your own means that you are not passionate enough for the space. Most good mobile devs I know have created some silly app at some point, just to kick the tires.
You might not have a full blown commercial app developed, but you should have some significant demo on your hand to show.
I don't like the argument that if you don't practice this particular piece at home, then you're not a passionate developer for some particular platform.
Good devs are good devs, and it's difficult to parse time out to learn each individual platform.
The good devs I know can learn stuff really quickly and the ability to engineer things well is fairly platform independent.
If we were talking about different layers (like say a Systems Developer trying to do UI work) that's a completely different story.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Good development practices already encompass all of these issues and a great developer can skill up for a new language in a few weeks.
The issue is that there is a lack of great developers in the world, not that mobile development is especially hard or requires any kind of unique skill-set.
As a developer aspiring to be a mobile developer, I have published one Android app, working on a second, but this is slow going as it is outside of my day job.
A question I don't have the answer to is, how do I know when enough is enough to start calling myself experienced? I can launch intents, activities, use SQLite, get to the GPS, Accelerometers, and more, but I have a hard time getting apps to market that prove all of this, since an app is more then just a technical checklist of features.
How can I effectively demonstrate to a potential employer I have the technical chops?
Just by having a reasonably successful non-game iPad app in the App Store, I've begun to receive a number of requests for custom-tailored enterprise versions of the app. I've solved the arguably "hard" problem of larger image viewing within the RAM constraints of the device and have a working, modular set of views that are easily adapted to almost any purpose.
Perhaps you can mitigate the "mobile" aspect somewhat. The model and the controller can be written by any competent developer without requiring the mobile skills. Then you can have a mobile specialist developer concentrate solely on the views.
At least that's how I am addressing this problem in my application. My mobile interface is just another view that talks to my API. Anyone can write it without having to understand what my application does. I am finding myself writing views for all kinds of environments and it's certainly much easier not to have to change my other code at all. :)
As dinedal noted, it is slow going, as it is outside his day job.
There used to be a time where employers would recognize an employee's abilities, and provide for his learning of new subject matter.
Sadly, today, you either have to be able to demonstrate the knowledge out of the gate, or be damned.
There are plenty of good developers who could easily immerse themselves in mobile app development for two weeks, and become pretty skilled mobile devs in little time.
Nobody wants to pay for that, though.