A mobile developer CV is read by two different audiences, often back to back: a recruiter scanning for stack keywords, and a tech lead scanning for evidence of shipping real apps to real users. A CV that wins both is structured so the recruiter sees the stack in the top third and the tech lead sees the shipping evidence in the experience bullets.
Most mobile CVs nail the first part and miss the second. This is what to fix.
The mobile-specific signals tech leads look for
When a senior iOS or Android engineer reviews a CV, the patterns they search for are not generic. Five mobile-specific signals carry most of the weight:
- Shipped apps with App Store / Play Store links — the single strongest signal. A live app with a download count and a few reviews beats five "led the development of" claims that lead nowhere clickable.
- Specific platform versions and OS minimums — "iOS 15+" or "Android API 26+" shows you have made real production decisions about device support.
- App-size and performance numbers — "Reduced cold-start time from 3.1s to 1.4s" or "Cut binary size 32%" are the kind of metric a tech lead can verify with a single follow-up question.
- Native experience, honestly stated — most mobile CVs over-claim native depth on the platform they did not actually build for. The fix is honesty: if you wrote the iOS app and reviewed PRs on the Android one, say that.
- Distribution and release work — TestFlight, App Store Connect, Play Console internal tracks, staged rollouts, in-app updates. These are platform-specific operational skills that distinguish a senior mobile dev from someone who has only worked on screens.
A working structure for the mobile developer CV
For a 1-page (junior to mid) or 2-page (senior+) CV:
Header block
Name, role (e.g. Senior iOS Engineer), location, GitHub, and the most important link of all: a portfolio URL or App Store link to a shipped app. If your top app is in the App Store, the link goes here, not buried in a project at the bottom.
Summary (3 lines, optional but high-leverage)
Three lines max: years of mobile experience, primary platform, one or two domain specialties. Example:
6 years building iOS apps for fintech and health, published 4 apps on the App Store (combined 400k+ downloads). Specialised in offline-first architecture and Core Data migrations at scale.
That single line already separates you from 80% of mobile CVs in the stack.
Skills section
Group by category and order by relevance to your target role. For an iOS-leaning candidate applying to a Swift role:
- Languages: Swift 5, Objective-C (maintenance only)
- iOS frameworks: SwiftUI, UIKit, Combine, Core Data, CloudKit, WidgetKit
- Architecture: MVVM, TCA, Clean Architecture, modularisation with SwiftPM
- Tooling: Xcode, Instruments, fastlane, Bitrise, Sentry
- Release: TestFlight, App Store Connect, phased rollouts, App Privacy reports
Four to six categories, twelve to twenty items. If you also do Android, a separate Android subsection is fine — but rank yourself honestly. Listing Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Hilt, Room when you have shipped one tutorial app in Kotlin is the kind of overclaim that gets caught in a 15-minute screen.
Experience bullets — the mobile bullet pattern
The strongest mobile bullets follow this shape:
Did[specific mobile thing]using[specific framework/tool]→ resulting in[measurable mobile outcome].
A few worked examples for an iOS engineer:
- Migrated the checkout flow from UIKit to SwiftUI across 18 screens, cutting the screen-build time by 40% and reducing the per-feature bug rate by ~25% in QA.
- Re-architected Core Data access through a sync coordinator, reducing crash-free users from 99.2% to 99.85% within two releases.
- Owned the App Store release pipeline (fastlane + match), bringing release prep from 2 days to 90 minutes and enabling weekly releases.
- Shipped a WidgetKit widget for the home-screen finance summary, picked up by 38% of monthly active users in the first six weeks.
Note the pattern: every bullet has a specific mobile artefact (UIKit, Core Data, fastlane, WidgetKit), a verb that shows ownership (migrated, re-architected, owned, shipped), and a number that a hiring manager can probe in interview.
For an Android engineer the equivalents are: Jetpack Compose migrations, Room schema work, Gradle build-time reductions, Play Console release management, Hilt module restructuring, Baseline Profile work for cold-start improvements.
Projects section — where the App Store links live
If you have shipped apps outside of work — even small ones — list them. Each entry: app name, App Store / Play Store link, one line of context, one line of technical highlight.
TideTracker — iOS surf-forecast app, 12k downloads. Built solo in SwiftUI with Core ML on-device wave-height prediction. App Store: [link].Three of these on a CV is almost always enough. They function as proof, not portfolio depth.
iOS Android developer CV — the cross-platform honesty problem
Most candidates claim more cross-platform fluency than they have, and tech leads are calibrated against this. The honest framing:
- Primary platform: the one where you have shipped, debugged in production, and made architecture calls.
- Secondary platform: the one where you have built something non-trivial but maybe not owned the release.
- Familiar: read code in it, contributed reviews, can navigate a codebase.
Writing iOS (primary), Android (familiar) is more credible than listing both as equal and getting caught at the technical screen. "Familiar" reads as honest and self-aware — two adjectives that move you forward.
Cross-platform frameworks — React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform
If your background is React Native or Flutter, treat the framework as the primary stack and list native bridges and platform-specific work as supporting evidence. Mobile teams hiring for RN want to see that you have:
- Shipped to both stores with the same codebase.
- Written or debugged native modules (Java/Kotlin or Swift/Objective-C) at least occasionally.
- Handled the platform-specific edges: push notifications setup, deep linking, in-app purchases, app review escalations.
A CV that lists React Native without any of these reads as web-developer-trying-mobile. Mobile-team hires care about who actually held the App Store account, not who wrote screens.
What to cut
- Outdated mobile tech — Cordova, PhoneGap, Xamarin as a top-line skill in 2026.
- Generic non-mobile bullets — "Wrote unit tests" with no platform context. Specify XCTest, JUnit, Espresso, etc.
- "Used Git, JIRA, Slack" — universal tools, not skills. They take up space that should be mobile-specific.
- Long lists of every iOS framework you have heard of — Combine, RxSwift, MapKit, ARKit, CoreImage, AVFoundation, MetricKit all stacked together signals padding, not breadth.
The Postulit team often sees mobile CVs generated from LinkedIn that pull in every job-board buzzword from a LinkedIn skills list — the curation pass for a mobile CV is shorter and more brutal than for many other roles, precisely because mobile interviewers test deeply on the few claims they care about.
Ship a small app, link it, write three bullets with App Store metrics. That is more signal than a 50-skill technology cloud.
A mobile CV that reads as honest, specific, and shipped beats one that reads as comprehensive. Every time.