The graph below shows the current trend in Kotlin’s favour vs Java and other alternative technologies. The language can also be used for front-end as well as back-end web development, data science and cross-platform mobile development. However, Kotlin is not just for Android apps and is also used for other applications. Kotlin is today’s #1 choice for Android app development for many developers as well as Google. Among the most popular 500 US apps, an impressive 87% were developed with Kotlin. Kotlin experienced a further surge in adoption when Google officially made the language its recommended choice for Android app development in 2019 – Android’s Kotlin-first approach.ĭespite Kotlin’s short existence, more than 20% of the apps active in the Play Store today have been coded with it. Since then, Kotlin has quickly gained traction, with its popularity boosted by Google making it an officially-supported programming language for Android development in 2017. While it was under beta development for several years before that, the first “stable” release (Kotlin 1.0) was only released by JetBrains in February 2016. Kotlin is still a relatively new programming language at just six years old. As a language, Kotlin leans heavily on Java and one of Kotlin’s goals was to achieve the same high compilation speed as Java.

Kotlin is a cross-platform, statically typed programming language initiated and developed by the company JetBrains. We will also look at some other applications of Kotlin where it can offer an alternative to Java. In this article, we look at whether Kotlin is now the universally better choice for Android app development, or whether Java maintains an edge in some circumstances. However, Kotlin is not only suitable for Android app development and is also becoming increasingly popular in other areas of software development. Even Google announced in May 2019 that Kotlin is now its preferred, or recommended, language for Android apps. But it has recently been losing market share to the newer and faster alternative of Kotlin. When it comes to Android mobile app development, Java was the programming language to use for a long time.

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Kotlin app