Google at Google I/O 2019 on Android Developer Blog that the Kotlin programming language is now the language of choice for developing applications for its mobile operating system, which means it is the company's primary support for all tools, components and APIs compared to other languages.
βAndroid development will increasingly focus on Kotlin,β Google writes in the announcement. βMany new Jetpack APIs and components will be offered first for Kotlin. If you are starting a new project, you must write it in Kotlin. Code written in Kotlin often means a lot less code for you to type, test, and maintain.β
Just two years ago, at I/O 2017, Google first announced support for Kotlin in its IDE, Android Studio. This came as a surprise given that Java has long been the language of choice for Android app development. Few announcements at the conference that year received more applause. Over the past two years, Kotlin has only grown in popularity. According to Google, more than 50% of professional Android developers use the language to develop their apps, and in the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, it ranks as the fourth most popular programming language in the world.
And it seems that now Google has found the point to increase its support for Kotlin. βWe're announcing that the next big step we're taking is making Kotlin our first,β said Chet Haase, engineer on the Android UI Toolkit development team at Google.
βWe understand that not everyone is still using Kotlin, but we believe you should give it a try,β Haase continues. βYou may have good reasons to still use the C++ and Java programming languages, and that's perfectly fine. They don't go anywhere."
It is worth noting that Kotlin was developed by JetBrains, founded by our compatriots and having offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. Thus, Kotlin can largely be considered a domestic development that has achieved worldwide recognition. It remains to congratulate the JetBrains team on this success and wish them further fruitful development.