Google Choose Kotlin over Java for Next Android development

Google has announced that the new statically typed, general-purpose programming language Kotlin, is now its preferred language for Android developments.

The Android owner made this announcement after claiming that 50% of professional Android developers now use Kotlin to develop their mobile apps.

“We’re announcing that the next big step that we’re taking is that we’re going Kotlin-first,” said Chet Haase, chief advocate for Android.

“We understand that not everybody is on Kotlin right now, but we believe that you should get there. There may be valid reasons for you to still be using the C++ and Java programming languages and that’s totally fine. These are not going away.”

The rise in Kotlin adoption was actually spurred by Google about 2 years ago, at the I/O 2017 conference; where the company announced that it is making Kotlin, a first-class language for writing Android apps – this was a shocking promotion for the new JetBrains programming language.

Kotlin is an open sourced language, developed under Apache 2.0 license; hence, it can be used for free. 

Surprisingly, the new language does not require Java developers to throw off their existing skills, as Kotlin is developed to be interoperable with Java – It is actually built with Java at its core.

The new language also boasts of the support for all major Java IDEs including IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, Eclipse, and NetBeans.

Although, there is an increase in Kotlin adoption, Java still holds the top place in the number of community contributors. This could be attributed to age and the new language may not be able contend with this figures, at least not anytime soon.

Here is how Google puts it, “Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often mean much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain.”

Who Else is Switching to Kotlin?

Top tech service providers such as Square, Pinterest, Basecamp, Netflix, Amazon, Uber, Trello, and Twitter have already declared their conversion to Kotlin.