I have been building mobile solutions for nearly 2 decades, I have seen things come and go, and I had loads of fun working in this space. A great part of my mobile development career involved consulting and for most of my work, I build the entire solution, including the web services and the data store and I am extremely proud of the things I have built. For the past 4 years I have been working in the Music Streaming industry. Using the tools from Xamarin, we built software for Android and iOS with a very large shared code base. The entire organization shares components through different platforms, it was great. Our products have a very high number of daily active users and has great ratings on the Apple AppStore and Google Play.

During these 4 years, a lot of things has happened. Microsoft acquired HockeyApp then later on Xamarin a few years back, and unfortunately, things went down hill. This is of course almost to be expected as Microsoft has bigger plans for these products and they will be all well integrated into a larger suite of products. I think things are starting to look better now, but for a very long while, it has been much worse. For instrumentation we had to switch from Xamarin Insights to RayGun. At that time when we did the switch, RayGun didn’t have the same feature set as Xamarin Insights so it felt like a down grade, with a higher price tag. RayGun eventually caught up and also improved the pricing plan.

Like anything else, if you work on the same suite of products for 4 years, no matter how fun it is, it becomes less and less exciting. Lately I have taken a keen interest in the recent developments in the Microsoft Azure space and early this year a very interesting opportunity presented itself. So after weeks of consideration, I decided to take a break from full time mobile development. For the past 2 months I have been a full time Cloud developer. Although I still do side projects and most of them will most likely still be mobile, I will be working on Cloud based solutions in my day job.