I Counted 46 Months of HN "Who Is Hiring": Native Mobile Fell by Two Thirds, React Native Did Not

Everyone in mobile has a feeling that the market got worse. I wanted a number that someone else could rerun, so I counted. The source is the monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” thread on Hacker News, from January 2023 to October 2026: 46 threads, about 15,000 top-level job posts. A keyword in a post is not an open role, and HN skews toward startups, so treat this as one sample of one corner of the market. Inside that corner, the result is clearer than I expected.

What the counts say

I compared the first six threads (January to June 2023) with the four most recent (July to October 2026). Average number of top-level posts per thread that mention each term:

Term	2023 H1	2026 H2 so far	Change
All posts	371.7	248.5	-33%
iOS	19.0	6.3	-67%
Android	18.8	5.8	-69%
React Native	11.3	9.8	-14%
Any mobile term	54.5	26.3	-52%
Full stack	93.5	58.8	-37%
Backend	89.7	56.8	-37%
AI or LLM	55.2	144.5	+162%

Three things stand out.

Native iOS and Android mentions fell by roughly two thirds. That is twice the drop in overall thread volume. React Native fell by 14%, less than the thread itself, so in this sample React Native kept its place while native lost it. Flutter, the other big cross-platform name, fell as much as native, from 2.8 to 0.8 posts per thread, so this is not a general cross-platform result.

Full stack and backend fell about as much as the thread did, 37% against 33%. Mobile as a whole fell 52%, so it lost more than the general web roles, but not by an order of magnitude. If you expected full stack to be booming while mobile collapsed, HN does not show that. Both shrank.

AI is the only bucket that grew. Mentions of “AI” or “LLM” went from 14.8% of posts in the first half of 2023 to 58.1% in the second half of 2026. Part of that is company descriptions (“an AI-powered platform for…”) and not roles. It still tells you what a hiring post has to say about itself today.

Share of posts, by half-year

Period	Any mobile term	Full stack	Backend	AI or LLM
2023 H1	14.7%	25.2%	24.1%	14.8%
2023 H2	11.8%	25.2%	21.0%	22.0%
2024 H1	10.8%	26.8%	22.9%	26.6%
2024 H2	11.7%	27.3%	24.9%	33.6%
2025 H1	12.5%	29.7%	26.0%	41.6%
2025 H2	9.9%	29.3%	27.6%	50.6%
2026 H1	11.9%	28.1%	26.8%	54.9%
2026 H2 (4 threads)	10.6%	23.6%	22.8%	58.1%

As a share of posts, mobile dropped from 14.7% to about 12% by the second half of 2023 and then stayed roughly flat. Most of the share loss happened in 2023. The absolute numbers kept falling after that because the threads themselves shrank.

How this sits next to other sources

Indeed Hiring Lab reported in July 2025 that Android, Java, .NET and iOS developer postings were all down by more than 60% compared with early 2020. HN is a different sample on a different baseline, but the direction and size for iOS and Android match. Indeed also says ML engineer postings were up 59% from early 2020.

The Pragmatic Engineer wrote in June 2026 that frontend titles are disappearing fastest, followed by native iOS and Android ones. The article puts AI engineering openings up 60% in a year at top companies, against 7% for software engineering overall.

I looked for a public dataset that splits iOS and Android from backend and full stack for 2025 and 2026 and did not find one. Indeed groups them, the Pragmatic Engineer chart is paywalled, BLS has no mobile category, and the Stack Overflow developer-type pages I tried returned 404. That gap is part of why I counted myself. My earlier mobile hiring write-up covers the rest of the picture: the rebound is senior-led, and pay splits by level.

Method and limits

• Source: the HN Algolia API, threads by the whoishiring account whose title starts with “Ask HN: Who is hiring”, created on or after 2023-01-01. Retrieved 2026-10-27. October 2026 is mostly complete, so the 2026 H2 figures use four threads.
• Only top-level comments count (the parent is the thread). A post counts once per term, however many times it uses it.
• “Any mobile term” is ios, android, react native, flutter, swiftui, kotlin or mobile. The AI term is ai, llm, llms or generative. The last one is noisy, because it also matches mobile web and mobile phones as a product. The iOS and Android rows are the cleaner signal.
• A keyword in a post is not an open role. “AI” shows up in company blurbs. HN skews to US and remote startups, not to the broader market. Dead and deleted comments may be missing from Algolia.
• I ran the script twice. The second run reproduced the same counts for the months I compared.

The script is short enough to read in full:

import json, urllib.request, urllib.parse, time, re
B = 'https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/'

def get(u):
    for _ in range(6):
        try: return json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(u, timeout=40))
        except Exception: time.sleep(3)
    raise SystemExit('fail ' + u)

threads, page = [], 0
while True:
    d = get(B + 'search_by_date?' + urllib.parse.urlencode({
        'query': '"Ask HN: Who is hiring"', 'tags': 'story,author_whoishiring',
        'hitsPerPage': 100, 'page': page}))
    threads += d['hits']
    if page >= d['nbPages'] - 1: break
    page += 1
threads = [t for t in threads
           if t['title'].startswith('Ask HN: Who is hiring') and t['created_at'] >= '2023-01-01']
threads.sort(key=lambda t: t['created_at'])

P = {'iOS': r'\bios\b', 'Android': r'\bandroid\b', 'React Native': r'react[ -]native',
     'Flutter': r'\bflutter\b', 'full stack': r'full[ -]?stack', 'backend': r'back[ -]?end',
     'AI/LLM': r'\bai\b|\bllms?\b|\bgenerative\b',
     'any mobile': r'\bios\b|\bandroid\b|react[ -]native|\bflutter\b|\bswiftui\b|\bkotlin\b|\bmobile\b'}

for t in threads:
    tid, txt, pg = t['objectID'], [], 0
    while True:
        d = get(B + 'search_by_date?' + urllib.parse.urlencode({
            'tags': f'comment,story_{tid}', 'hitsPerPage': 1000, 'page': pg}))
        txt += [(h.get('comment_text') or '') for h in d['hits'] if str(h.get('parent_id')) == tid]
        if pg >= d['nbPages'] - 1: break
        pg += 1
    row = {'month': t['created_at'][:7], 'top_level': len(txt)}
    row.update({k: sum(1 for x in txt if re.search(p, x, re.I)) for k, p in P.items()})
    print(row)

What I take from it

For someone choosing a specialty, native depth alone is the weakest position in this sample, and most of the share loss came in 2023. React Native held up better than iOS or Android taken alone, while Flutter did not. Posts that mention AI are now the majority, and I read that as a sign that being able to show how you ship with coding agents matters more than it did in 2023.

What I did not measure: salaries, seniority, remote versus on-site, or anything outside HN. If you have a larger postings dataset with an iOS and Android split, I would like to see whether it shows the same two-thirds drop. Does it match what you see in your own hiring?