After two years of using Kotlin in Android mobile development — a domain long dominated by Java — Google has finally announced Kotlin as the number one choice for Android app development.
The acknowledgment comes as part of the ongoing Google I/O 2019 conference. “Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” writes Google in a blog post.
The Android maker says that “many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin.”
Android Jetpack is a collection of Android software components that make it easier to create Android apps.
So if you are a developer and you’re about to start a new Android app project, you should write it in Kotlin.
Code written in Kotlin usually requires less effort– with lesser lines of code to type, test, and maintain. So it isn’t hard to understand why Android app development is becoming “Kotlin-first.”
It is to be noted that even though Kotlin is Google’s new favorite programming language, Java and C++ will continue to receive support.
For the uninitiated, Google had announced support for Kotlin in its Android Studio IDE only two years ago, at I/O 2017. It came as a surprise to many but the language continued to gain more fans.
Now, more than 50% of professional Android developers, including top Google developers, now use the language to develop apps, according to Google.
The company describes Kotlin as “a modern, statically typed programming language that will boost your productivity and increase your developer happiness.”
Overall, Kotlin ranks as the fourth most loved programming language in the Stack Overflow developer survey and stands as one of the fastest-growing programming languages on GitHub in number of contributors.”
