Top 12 Android Developer Skills to Put on Your Resume

In the crowded world of Android hiring, a sharp resume is your foot in the door and the nudge past the pile. The skills below don’t just read well—they show you can ship, fix, and grow modern Android apps that behave under pressure and look good doing it.

Android Developer Skills

1. Kotlin
2. Java
3. Android SDK
4. Android Studio
5. Firebase
6. RESTful APIs
7. MVVM
8. RxJava
9. Gradle
10. Git
11. Material Design
12. Jetpack Compose

1. Kotlin

Kotlin is the modern, concise, null-safe language for Android. It blends clarity with power, plays nicely with Java, and unlocks coroutines, flows, and a clean functional style that keeps bugs at bay.

Why It's Important

Google’s preferred language for Android reduces boilerplate, improves safety, and speeds up delivery. From coroutines to extension functions and sealed hierarchies, Kotlin helps you write code that’s easier to read, test, and maintain.

How to Improve Kotlin Skills

Focus on these areas and your Kotlin fluency rises fast:

1. Idiomatic Kotlin: Prefer data classes, extension functions, sealed/inline classes, and smart casts. Drop the Java habits when they get in the way.

2. Coroutines and Flow: Master structured concurrency, scopes, dispatchers, and cold vs hot streams. Backpressure and cancellation awareness matter.

3. Null Safety: Lean on types, not wishes. Use nullable types, require/check, and contracts wisely.

4. Generics and Reified Types: Build safer, flexible APIs with inline and reified tricks where it counts.

5. Style and Naming: Consistent formatting, clear names, and small functions. Future you will thank you.

6. Daily Practice: Ship small features, refactor legacy pieces, and write unit tests that pin behavior.

How to Display Kotlin Skills on Your Resume

2. Java

Java powers a vast slice of Android’s ecosystem and many mature codebases. It brings a rich standard library, battle-tested patterns, and compatibility with almost everything on the platform.

Why It's Important

Plenty of production apps are Java-first. Knowing Java means you can maintain, modernize, and interoperate without friction—vital in real teams, real deadlines.

How to Improve Java Skills

Build depth where it pays:

1. Solid Foundations: OOP, collections, concurrency primitives, generics, and exception handling done right.

2. Android-Focused Practices: Memory patterns on a mobile device differ. Watch lifecycles, threading, and object churn.

3. Libraries That Win: Retrofit or OkHttp for networking, Moshi or Gson for JSON, and a DI tool such as Hilt/Dagger when complexity grows.

4. Refactoring Discipline: Break large classes apart, isolate responsibilities, and add tests as a safety net.

5. Code Reviews: Read great code, not just write it. Patterns stick when you see them used well.

How to Display Java Skills on Your Resume

3. Android SDK

The Android SDK is the toolbox: platform APIs, build tools, and libraries for activities, services, content providers, permissions, storage, media, sensors, and more.

Why It's Important

You can’t build real apps without it. Understanding the SDK’s building blocks lets you craft features that behave correctly across versions, devices, and weird edge cases.

How to Improve Android SDK Skills

Turn knowledge into muscle memory:

1. Core Components: Activities, Fragments, Services, BroadcastReceivers, ContentProviders—know when and why to use each.

2. Jetpack Foundation: ViewModel, Navigation, Room, WorkManager, DataStore. Reliability with less glue code.

3. Permissions and Privacy: Runtime permissions, scoped storage, foreground services, and background limits for modern Android versions.

4. Performance: Profilers for CPU, memory, and network. Fix jank, trim allocations, and cache with intent.

5. Testing: Unit, instrumentation, and UI tests. Mock data sources, test lifecycles, assert UI state.

How to Display Android SDK Skills on Your Resume

4. Android Studio

Android Studio is your home base. The IDE that builds, debugs, profiles, and tests everything you ship.

Why It's Important

Speed matters. The right setup shortens feedback loops, surfaces performance issues early, and keeps you in flow instead of fighting the tool.

How to Improve Android Studio Skills

Trim friction, boost throughput:

1. Stay Current: Keep Android Studio and the Android Gradle Plugin updated for fixes and performance gains.

2. Memory and Performance: Tune IDE and emulator RAM, use hardware acceleration, and adjust VM options when builds feel sluggish.

3. Apply Changes and Live Edit: Replace legacy Instant Run habits. Faster iteration for both Views and Compose.

4. Profilers and Build Analyzer: Hunt down jank, leaks, heavy allocations, and slow tasks. Measure before you guess.

5. Shortcuts and Live Templates: Navigate, refactor, and generate code without lifting your hands from the keyboard.

6. Emulator Snapshots: Save stable states and boot fast. Test flows without the setup tax.

7. Lint and Inspections: Catch issues early—nullability, threading, resources, and accessibility.

8. Dependency Hygiene: Keep versions aligned, remove duplicates, and watch for heavy transitive trees.

How to Display Android Studio Skills on Your Resume

5. Firebase

Firebase is a platform of hosted tools—Auth, Firestore/Realtime Database, Functions, Crashlytics, Performance, Remote Config, Analytics, Test Lab, Messaging—that help you ship features without managing servers.

Why It's Important

It trims backend overhead and puts data, auth, and observability at your fingertips. Faster iteration, fewer moving parts, more focus on product.

How to Improve Firebase Skills

Make it reliable, secure, and cost-aware:

1. Model Data for Queries: Design documents and indexes for your access patterns. Fan out when reads matter, denormalize prudently.

2. Security Rules: Lock down reads/writes with clear, testable rules and custom claims where needed.

3. Offline and Sync: Turn on offline persistence and handle conflict resolution gracefully.

4. Performance and Monitoring: Track cold starts, slow traces, and network costs. Fix hotspots, not hunches.

5. App Check and Auth: Protect backend resources, support multiple auth providers, and harden session flows.

6. Cloud Functions: Offload server work—webhooks, scheduled jobs, and data triggers—close to your data.

7. Release Confidence: Use Crashlytics signals, staged rollouts, Remote Config, and A/B tests to ship safely.

How to Display Firebase Skills on Your Resume

6. RESTful APIs

RESTful APIs let your app talk to the world over HTTP. Clean verbs, predictable resources, and tidy payloads—usually JSON—keep clients simple and resilient.

Why It's Important

Most apps depend on servers. A good API contract means fewer bugs, faster screens, and fewer surprises when the network gets spotty.

How to Improve RESTful APIs Skills

Build and consume APIs that won’t bite back:

1. Correct Verbs and Status Codes: GET for reads, POST for creation, PUT/PATCH for updates, DELETE for removal. Be clear and consistent.

2. Caching: Use ETags, Cache-Control, and sensible TTLs to cut latency and data usage.

3. Pagination and Filtering: Avoid giant responses. Support cursors or page/limit with stable ordering.

4. Versioning: Introduce changes without breaking clients. Keep old versions alive long enough.

5. Security First: HTTPS everywhere, solid auth (OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect), and least-privilege scopes.

6. Structured Errors: Machine-readable error bodies with codes and messages that humans can act on.

7. JSON Discipline: Stable schemas, consistent casing, and explicit nullability. On Android, parse with Moshi or Gson.

8. Rate Limiting and Retries: Protect servers, handle backoff, and surface limits to users gracefully.

9. Documentation: OpenAPI specs and examples reduce guesswork and speed up integration.

How to Display RESTful APIs Skills on Your Resume

7. MVVM

MVVM splits concerns: UI in the View, logic and state in the ViewModel, and data in repositories and sources. Less coupling, more testability.

Why It's Important

It scales. Teams can move faster when responsibilities are crisp, state is explicit, and business logic isn’t entangled with UI widgets.

How to Improve MVVM Skills

Keep it clean and predictable:

1. Separation of Concerns: ViewModels know nothing about Views. Repositories wrap data sources. No shortcuts.

2. Modern State: Prefer Kotlin Flow or StateFlow for streams and UI state. Use LiveData where interoperability helps.

3. Data Binding or Compose State: In Views, Data Binding can reduce glue code. In Compose, hoist state and pass it down—no magic fields.

4. DI and Testability: Inject dependencies with Hilt/Dagger. Provide fakes for repositories and assert ViewModel behavior.

5. UI State Modeling: Represent loading, success, and error with sealed classes or interfaces. No ambiguous booleans.

6. Error and Lifecycle Handling: Scope coroutines to ViewModel, cancel on clear, and surface recoverable errors explicitly.

How to Display MVVM Skills on Your Resume

8. RxJava

RxJava offers a powerful reactive toolkit for composing async work and event streams. Many legacy and cross-platform Android codebases still rely on it heavily.

Why It's Important

When you’re maintaining or integrating with Rx-heavy apps, fluency pays off. Streams, operators, schedulers, and backpressure management keep complex flows under control.

How to Improve RxJava Skills

Build comfort with the moving parts:

1. Core Types: Observable, Flowable, Single, Maybe, Completable—pick the right shape for the job.

2. Operators: Map, flatMap, switchMap, debounce, merge, zip. Compose, don’t tangle.

3. Backpressure: Understand when it appears and how Flowable strategies mitigate it.

4. Schedulers: Choose IO for blocking work, computation for CPU-bound tasks, and Android main thread for UI.

5. Resource Management: Dispose or clear subscriptions to avoid leaks. Tie lifecycles to scopes.

6. Testing and Debugging: Use TestScheduler and assertion helpers. Trace chains when behavior surprises you.

7. Interop: Bridge to Kotlin Flow when migrating gradually.

How to Display RxJava Skills on Your Resume

9. Gradle

Gradle runs the show: builds, tests, signing, flavors, and dependency management. Small tweaks, big time savings.

Why It's Important

Faster builds, clearer configs, and reproducible outputs mean shorter feedback loops and happier teams.

How to Improve Gradle Skills

Make the build work for you:

1. Configuration Cache and Build Cache: Turn them on. Reuse work across builds and machines.

2. Parallel and Incremental: Enable parallel execution, incremental annotation processing, and Gradle daemon (default) for speed.

3. Use KSP over KAPT: Prefer KSP where supported to cut build times.

4. Keep Versions Tight: Update Gradle, AGP, and dependencies together. Avoid dynamic versions that break reproducibility.

5. Profile Builds: Use Build Analyzer or profile reports to spot slow tasks and heavy configuration.

6. Slim Dependencies: Remove duplicates, enforce constraints, and split modules only when it truly speeds iteration.

7. Shrink and Optimize: Use R8 (default) for minification and resource shrinking. Keep mappings for meaningful crash reports.

8. Baseline Profiles: Pre-warm critical code paths for smoother startup and scrolling.

How to Display Gradle Skills on Your Resume

10. Git

Git tracks history, enables safe collaboration, and gives you the confidence to refactor without fear.

Why It's Important

Feature branches, code reviews, and clear histories keep teams aligned. Rollbacks and hotfixes become routine, not chaos.

How to Improve Git Skills

Sharper workflow, fewer mistakes:

1. Commit Cleanly: Small, focused commits with clear messages. Tell the story one step at a time.

2. Branching Strategy: Adopt a workflow (trunk-based, Git Flow, or simple feature branches) and stick to it.

3. Rebase Wisely: Keep histories tidy. Rebase your work before merging; avoid rewriting shared history.

4. .gitignore for Android: Exclude build outputs, local configs, and IDE files.

5. Pull Requests and Reviews: Discuss design, spot regressions, and enforce standards through reviews.

6. Tags and Releases: Tag stable builds, automate changelogs, and trace issues to commits.

7. CI/CD Hooks: Trigger tests, linters, and builds on push to keep main always healthy.

How to Display Git Skills on Your Resume

11. Material Design

Material Design brings a shared language for visuals, motion, and interaction. With Material Design 3 (Material You), apps adapt to user color schemes, accessibility needs, and device form factors with ease.

Why It's Important

Consistent UI patterns reduce friction. Thoughtful motion and hierarchy make apps feel polished and predictable across phones, tablets, and foldables.

How to Improve Material Design Skills

Design that breathes and behaves:

1. Material 3 Components: Use the latest components and tokens—color, type, shape—to keep visuals coherent.

2. Dynamic Color: Support system-derived palettes for instant personalization. Provide strong defaults when dynamic color isn’t available.

3. Typography and Layout: Establish hierarchy with type scales and spacing. Let content, not chrome, lead.

4. Meaningful Motion: Subtle transitions and gestures that reinforce user intent, not distract from it.

5. Accessibility: Contrast, hit targets, semantics, and TalkBack support. Design for everyone from the start.

6. Large Screens: Responsive layouts, adaptive navigation, and window size classes for tablets and foldables.

How to Display Material Design Skills on Your Resume

12. Jetpack Compose

Jetpack Compose is Android’s declarative UI toolkit. Less XML, more readable UI code, faster iteration, and state handled where it belongs.

Why It's Important

Compose accelerates UI development, simplifies state management, and makes testing UI logic far less painful than traditional views.

How to Improve Jetpack Compose Skills

Lean into the model:

1. State and Side-Effects: Understand remember, derivedStateOf, keys, and side-effect APIs. Unidirectional data flow wins.

2. Layouts and Lazy Components: Compose layout primitives and Lazy lists that stay smooth under pressure.

3. Performance: Avoid unnecessary recompositions, hoist state, and keep composables small and stable.

4. Navigation and Architecture: Pair Compose with ViewModel, StateFlow, and a navigation library for a clean stack.

5. Interoperability: Mix Compose and Views during migrations without rewriting the world.

6. Previews and Tooling: Use multi-device previews, parameters, and interactive previews to iterate quickly.

7. Testing: Write UI tests with the Compose testing APIs. Assert semantics, not pixels.

How to Display Jetpack Compose Skills on Your Resume