Kotlin har blivit det prioriterade programmeringsspråket för Android

Google, under the Google I/O 2019 conference, announced in their developer blog for the Android operating system tillkännagav, that the Kotlin programming language is now the preferred language for developing applications for its mobile operating system, which means its primary support from the company in all tools, components, and APIs compared to other languages. 

“Android development will increasingly focus on Kotlin,” Google writes in the announcement. “Many new APIs and Jetpack components will be offered first for Kotlin. If you are starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin. Code written in Kotlin often means much less code for you both in input as well as in testing and maintenance.”

Only two years ago, at the I/O 2017 conference, Google first announced support for Kotlin in its IDE — Android Studio. This was unexpected, given that for a long time, Java remained the preferred language for developing applications for Android. Only a few announcements at that conference received more applause. Over the last two years, Kotlin's popularity has only increased. According to Google, more than 50% of professional Android developers use this language for developing their applications, and in the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, it is considered the fourth most popular programming language in the world.

And it seems that Google has now found the sense in increasing its support for Kotlin. “We announce that the next big step we are taking is that Kotlin will become our first,” said Chet Haase, an engineer on the Android UI Toolkit development team at Google.

“We understand that not everyone is using Kotlin yet, but we believe you should give it a try,” continues Haase. “You may have good reasons to still use programming languages C++ and Java, and that's perfectly fine. They are not going 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. Let's congratulate the JetBrains team on this success and wish them continued fruitful development.