How to stand out in the Mobile App Job market?

Hey guys,

Frequent browser here and I wasn’t sure if is the right place to ask but I’ll give it a shot anyway(will take it down if mods think it’s not relevant)

So I have been playing around with Kotlin, Jetpack Compose and learning about MVVM and the Android SDK for the past 3 months in. Turns out I am really enjoying this more than I should considering it’s more of a casual hobby type thing.

But lately work hasn’t been satisfying nor challenging to me anymore(Food & Hospitality) and I wondered about employment in the mobile app sector.

Been reading around about how it doesn’t matter if you know Java (Although great to know as alot of older apps are built with it) but was reading that you’ll pick it up along the way seeing that Kotlin is the GO TO language for Android for the foreseeable future.

So apart from making my own apps and putting them on the App store. Learning how to use Git. Understand the principles of OOP. Learn how to properly name my classes to avoid comment overload(I’ve been reading the Clean Code book & the Pragmatic Programmer during my spare time at work)

What else am I missing in terms of hard skill sets?

Soft skill wise I’ve been told I’m solid at least from feedbacks from my peers saying that I’m easy to approach, social and helpful when needed.

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I read about interviews asking to see your code, giving you a problem to solve etc

Some horror stories of companies asking you to do a non-paid coding session to prove your skills etc

Can’t say I’m too worried about those at this moment nor am I concerned if it’s within valid grounds

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Some background about me.

Have done Web Development back in 2012 till 2015. Mostly as a CodeIgniter, WordPress developer using SASS, HTML, PHP, JS, JSON & AWS. But at that time I just wasn’t getting far enough and succumb to imposter syndrome plus having rather unsupportive team mates didn’t really help my mentality either. Ended up pursing work as a cook (At least it smells nicer in the kitchen ngl XD)

I remember how I had a portfolio with all the websites I’ve done for my own clients as a freelancer which got me my first gig as a web dev at a local company.

So am kinda thinking its around the same path towards the mobile app dev career but thought I should ask around!

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Thanks for reading 😀