Over the years I've heard (and experienced) both sides of a rather odd coin in the Android developer world.
- Side 1: Companies, particularly startups and small teams, want staff+ Android product engineers and struggle to find them.
- Side 2: Staff+ Android engineers struggle to find jobs if they involve product work.
Companies/non-Android folks in general are surprised by the apparent lack of high level Android product engineers out there mostly because their perception is shaped by their experience with (and, let's be frank, primary focus on) iOS.
Two things are true here:
- Android developers often end up in more infrastructure work with experience. The most influential Android developers out there tend to be quite oriented toward infrastructure, you can probably count the influential Android product engineers on one (maybe two if you're well-connected) hands.
- iOS developers have a more even distribution of product and infrastructure work with experience. The influential iOS developers out there are often quite oriented toward product.
This isn't some random or bespoke asymmetry between the ecosystems though, I claim these actually happen for the same reason. There's multiple factors obviously, but at the end of the day it rolls up to one core principle:
Smart people want to solve interesting problems.
The reason this diverges is because iOS remains prioritized at most tech companies. iOS apps get design, product, and executive leadership attention. By extension, they get more headroom and resourcing to pursue interesting product problems.
Android users, even in 2026, are still second-class citizens in the average US tech company. It's not that surprising; it mirrors their design, product, executive, and even broader user base, so there is natural gravitation toward iOS first. I can count the number of mobile designers I've met in 15 years that use Android as their daily driver on one hand. US-based tech companies aren't usually pursuing interesting Android product problems.
The natural result of this is that Android developers often gravitate toward the spaces where they can work on interesting problems, which usually ends up being infrastructure. At the very least, if they want to level up beyond senior, that's often the only space to get that cross-functional visibility and "high impact" that management likes to see on a promo packet. It's not because they're bad at product, it's because no one wants to do a boring job.
Lastly, I claim that this cycle is perpetuated by side 1 of that coin. Companies, you want a smart engineer that wants to solve interesting problems. Hire an infrastructure engineer that wants to do product and you'll get a good engineer that can do both. Mobile developers are, by nature, full stack developers that can work on a broad technical space. Staff+ engineers get to that level because they care deeply about quality and like a challenge. Give them one and they won't let you down.