Kotlin on Android. Now official
Today, at the Google I/O keynote, the Android team announced first-class support for Kotlin. We believe this is a great step for Kotlin, and fantastic news for Android developers as well as the rest of our community. We’re thrilled with the opportunities this opens up.
For Android developers, Kotlin support is a chance to use a modern and powerful language, helping solve common headaches such as runtime exceptions and source code verbosity. Kotlin is easy to get started with and can be gradually introduced into existing projects, which means that your existing skills and technology investments are preserved.
Starting now, Android Studio 3.0 ships with Kotlin out of the box, meaning Android developers no longer need to install any extras or worry about compatibility. It also means that moving forward, you can rest assured that both JetBrains and Google will be supporting Android development in Kotlin.
In case you are concerned about other platforms that Kotlin supports (Kotlin/JVM for server and desktop, Kotlin/JS and Kotlin/Native), please be sure that they are as important for us as ever. Our vision here is to make Kotlin a uniform tool for end-to-end development of various applications bridging multiple platforms with the same language. This includes full-stack web applications, Android and iOS clients, embedded/IoT and much more.
Programming languages are just like human ones: the more people speak a language, the better. First-class support on Android will likely bring more users to Kotlin, and we expect the community to grow significantly. This means more libraries and tools developed in/for Kotlin, more experience shared, more Kotlin job offerings, more learning materials published, and so on. We are excited to see the Kotlin ecosystem flourish!
We will be partnering with Google to create a non-profit foundation for Kotlin. Language development will continue to be sponsored by JetBrains, and the Kotlin team (over 40 people and second largest team at the company) will operate as usual. Andrey Breslav remains the Lead Language Designer, and Kotlin will be developed under the same principles as before. We’ll keep our design processes open, because your feedback is critical for us in moving Kotlin in the right direction.
If you’re at Google I/O, make sure you stop by one of the Kotlin talks on the schedule. And of course, don’t forget to register for KotlinConf in San Francisco in November. It will be an amazing event!
A Big Thank You!
When we started the journey with Kotlin over 6 years ago, we aimed at creating a language that would be in line with the same principles that drive our tools – create something that helps developers with the tedious and mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on what’s truly important. And of course make the process as enjoyable and fun as possible.
We want to thank Google and the Android team for their trust in Kotlin, but above all we want to thank you, our community, our users. Without you Kotlin wouldn’t be where it is today. Thank you for accompanying us during this journey and we hope you join us for the exciting road ahead.
Frequently Asked Questions
We’ve prepared answers to a series of questions that you may have in regard to this announcement. If your question is not covered, please feel free to ask us in the comments. If you are new to Kotlin, make sure you check out the FAQ on the web site where you can learn more about the basics.
Is Kotlin going to become primarily focused on Android?
One of Kotlin’s goals is to be a language that is available on multiple platforms and this will always be the case. We’ll keep supporting and actively developing Kotlin/JVM (server-side, desktop and other types of applications), and Kotlin/JS. We are working on Kotlin/Native for other platforms such as macOS, iOS and IoT/embedded systems.
How does this impact Kotlin’s release cycles?
Kotlin will continue to have its own independent release cycle from that of Android or Android Studio. The projects remain completely independent. Obviously there will be close collaboration between the product teams to make sure that Kotlin is always working correctly in Android Studio.
Who’s going to work on the Android Studio plugin?
JetBrains will continue to work on the Android Studio plugin, collaborating closely with the Android Studio team.
Will this affect the support for IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse or Netbeans?
No. Kotlin continues to be a language that targets multiple platforms and support for other IDE’s will continue to be provided as before. Obviously emphasis will be placed on IntelliJ IDEA with hopefully community contributions on the other ones.
Will this affect support for macOS or iOS?
No. We still have plans to support both of these systems with Kotlin/Native and nothing has changed in this regard.
Is JetBrains going to be acquired by Google?
No. JetBrains has no plans of being acquired by any company. JetBrains is and continues to be an independent tool vendor catering to developers regardless of their platform or language of choice.
Maxim Shafirov
Charles says:
May 17, 2017Best news ever!
Richard Lalancette says:
June 14, 2017Indeed Why Another Language!!! sigh
Ryan Simon says:
May 17, 2017So excited for what this means for Kotlin and for development on Android. Thanks for making such a great tool and working with Google to make this happen!
Vithorio says:
May 17, 2017Am I dreaming?
susake says:
May 19, 2017of course,wake up
zerver says:
June 2, 2017absolute
Kirill Rakhman says:
May 17, 2017Android Studio 3.0?
Michael Evans says:
May 17, 2017What he said. Where is the magical AS3
Anvith says:
May 18, 2017Its in the Dev channel of AS. Canary 1
Robert Chrzanowski says:
May 17, 2017This is great news! Thanks to everyone at JetBrains for massively improving the developer experience on Android.
Adrian Enns says:
May 29, 2017+1
Sameer Nafdey says:
May 17, 2017Sounds interesting.. waiting for 3.0 and iOS support
susake says:
May 19, 2017me too
abi says:
May 31, 2017A new language is always welcome but I wonder if someone at google is looking to simplify the android development environment as well? It’s messy
zerver says:
June 2, 2017iOS？are you kidding？
Lakedaemon says:
May 17, 2017I have been using Kotlin for android development for the past 3 years…
Apart from new users/popularity (I don’t care), Android studio (using intellij is what sold Kotlin to me), what benefits will there be for the current android developers with the new Google/JetBrains collaboration ?
Will they start writing framework classes in Kotlin ?
Will they fine tune art/dalvik so that things work better/faster ?
Lakedaemon says:
May 17, 2017I have been using Kotlin for android development for the past 3 years…
Apart from new users/popularity (I don’t care), Android studio (using intellij is what sold Kotlin to me), what benefits will there be for the current android developers with the new Google/JetBrains collaboration ?
Will they start writing framework classes in Kotlin ?
Will they fine tune art/dalvik so that things work better/faster ?
I see mostly benefits for Google (hello Oracle)… what’s in for us, kotlin users ?
Wired4more says:
May 18, 2017One benefit is that large companies can increase their confidence to standardize on Kotlin by knowing that it is officially listed as a first class Android language. This should green light a lot more projects.
Hassan says:
May 18, 2017Will Google write API examples in Kotlin? In my last project, I was copying java code knowing that Android Studio smart enough to convert it into Kotlin. I was bored for not knowing how to do something in Kotlin i.e adding a listener, AsyncTask etc.
Andrew says:
May 18, 2017I beleive that Google will convert their docs to something that Apple or Microsoft have
For the first time a relatively short migration guide at developer.android will be enough.
All the SDK stuff work the same way, you just have to specify a type once instead of twice and memorize some new keywords.
Listeners(my favourite part) in comparsion with java are like magic, bunches of useless interfaces are no more.
You can create a method with callback like this:
fun myMethod(callback: (Mytype)->Unit) {
var tmp: MyType = MyType()
//do something
callback(tmp)
}
and call it like this:
myMethod {
weakRef?.get()?.setValue(it)
}
Tropa says:
May 18, 2017hassan yes, please read https://developer.android.com/kotlin/faq.html
Bosun Egberinde says:
May 17, 2017Wow! This is Awesome!!!
Kevin c says:
May 17, 2017Kaitlin should try and become a first class Lang on FuchsiaOS. Especially now with the native VM.
Mariano Zorrilla says:
May 18, 2017Amazing news! Congrats to the team that make this happen. Waiting anxiously for that AS 3.0 build to be up.
Maher says:
May 18, 2017You can download the canary version it is now delivered with Kotlin
Renan Neves says:
May 18, 2017Still good! Now it’s Kotlin in charge.
Debo Ajagbe says:
May 18, 2017Great news
Victor Ude says:
May 18, 2017Thank you, sincerely, for making wonderful products and continuing to improve the quality of life for developers.
Alexander Orlov says:
May 18, 2017Happy to hear that JetBrains has no plans of being acquired by any bigger corporation. This would destroy your innovation potential and make you biased towards certain tech. strategies.
Stay independent and privately owned which is the best long-term evolvement strategy for a great tech tool vendor!
Igor Ganapolsky says:
May 18, 2017I wonder how developers will balance learning Java 8 with Kotlin. And now that Java 9 is just around the corner, it can get a bit overwhelming. Do you have advice on which features to focus on at the moment?
Parsee says:
May 18, 2017Why not Scala or Idris? Is Google going to be acquired by JetBrains?
Matias says:
May 18, 2017Wut? I can’t help but wonder how JetBrains would buy Google. Anyway, Scala for Android has a huge overhead and Idris has a smaller community than Ghost for Unity.
Reza Shah says:
May 18, 2017Wow, great news.
Really happy to hear this.
Tom Tantisalidchai says:
May 18, 2017I watched the keynote this morning. I really feel happy for your team. Congratulations! This is really great and exciting news.
huodong says:
May 18, 2017Cheers!
Hassan says:
May 18, 2017Android Studio takes a long time to compile Kotlin, I want compilation as fast as java. When will it be possible?
doubll says:
May 18, 2017good bye, java?
Bastien Ladron says:
May 18, 2017Because of Kotlin, Java has no more reason to be used for next developments. And it’s a fully-positive news, not a fighting situation 🙂
eugene says:
May 18, 2017android app devs now have the freedom of choice of programming lagnuages when developing app using android sdk: they can use only java as they used, they can mix java and kotlin in the same project, or they can only use kotlin in their project.
huangkuncan says:
May 18, 2017Good news,I will try kotlin today
Herbert Dupree says:
May 18, 2017Inquiring mind Q:
Can Kotlin’s relationship with Java be compared to TypeScript’s relationship to JavaScript?
Kdawgwilk says:
May 18, 2017It is more similar to Swift’s relationship to Objective-C
Herbert Dupree says:
May 19, 2017Thanks for the response.
happy everyday says:
May 18, 2017breaking news, hope kotlin can really make development of android better
snowdream says:
May 18, 2017Wow, great news.
ptfree says:
May 18, 2017Great news, last concern on using it for our company app is gone now, thanks.
Saidur Rahman says:
May 18, 2017This is really a great move by Google. Hope now Kotlin will get more priority in the programming language arena. great news indeed.
Fahmi Sidik says:
May 18, 2017So happy reading this news.
blackcater says:
May 18, 2017Congratulation!!!
I am not lonely any more!!!
Putra says:
May 18, 2017Awesome news for Android Developers, for student collage, and lecture, update the curiculum now LOL
😀
bowman says:
May 18, 2017Cheers , JetBrains is a Great company!
Pablo says:
May 18, 2017That’s sad.
Java is, was and will be fine language. I don’t understand why to use kotlin.
It’s just art for art, just another ‘thing’ that bored developers could use to be not so bored…
Klaus says:
May 18, 2017I don’t agree, try to check e.g. the type projection syntax here https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/generics.html this is among other things a great plus when using Kotlin.
Bastien Ladron says:
May 18, 2017Scala is a kind of art for art. Kotlin is pragmatic and brings you saving-time features, it combines fun and utility.
In comparison, Java struggles to try to give us modern features we need.
A simple example that I showed to a colleague of mines yesterday:
#Kotlin: executions.groupBy { it.price }.size > 1
#Java: executions.stream().collect(Collectors.groupingBy(it -> it.getPrice(), Collectors.counting())).size() > 1
Which one do you prefer?
Leonid says:
May 18, 2017Inspiring news!
Keep making greatest tools for developers. Thank you!
Christian says:
May 18, 2017Could JetBrains create a nice “Who is using Kotlin?” page on kotlinlang.org? That would be very helpful to convince manager to give Kotlin a try!
Dmitry Jemerov says:
May 18, 2017There’s a “Who’s using Kotlin” block on the main page of kotlinlang.org.
Alexander says:
May 18, 2017May be it was in previous desing. Now there is no such block
Alexander says:
May 18, 2017But there is “Kotlin Usage Highlights”
JHelp says:
May 18, 2017Solve common headaches such as runtime exceptions => Good developper haven’t this issue.
and source code verbosity => Verbosity have lot of advantage , you know and can control what you do
Whs says:
May 18, 2017Hi , I have a question as a beginner of Kotlin. Since I’m a Android-Engineer and working with Unity ,and provide .jar files to the unity engineers ,I wonder if we can work fine with Kotlin like Java . Thanks very much !
Nikhil Maurya says:
May 18, 2017This account is just to say: Congratulations
Shivam Agrawal says:
May 18, 2017Very Nice, very excited for programming in Kotlin for Android app development.
Hawken says:
May 18, 2017It’s good for us !
Oleg Alekseev says:
May 18, 2017Cool news
Marcel Bradea says:
May 18, 2017! ! ! ! CONGRATULATIONS ! ! ! !
This is a tremendous accomplishment guys, and will mark the official start of a post-Java era.
YOU GUYS ACHIEVED THIS.
Incredible. Tears of joy over here.
Marco says:
May 19, 2017It’s hour of learn Kotlin…
Mustafa says:
May 19, 2017it looks like swift !!
xwsoul says:
May 19, 2017Congratulations!
You have worked for it.
Kasun says:
May 19, 2017…………This is great news! Thanks to everyone at JetBrains…….
MagicWeirdo says:
May 19, 2017When will Android Studio 3.0 be released?
Dmitry Jemerov says:
May 19, 2017Android Studio 3.0 Canary 1 is available now. As for the final release, we can’t provide any information.
Rishabh Rawat says:
May 19, 2017kotlin for android this is good news.But i want to know that is jetbrains has future plan to support kotlin in ios. But jetbrains has done very great work because now kotlin run on android dalvik virtual machine, Java virtual machine and javascript V8 engine and future plan is to support kotlin in embedded system which is ARM(advanced RISC machine) based processor.So Now we say that Kotlin is future language which support in any platform and virtual machine.
Nixon Kosgei says:
May 20, 2017I love Jetbrains
ikidou says:
May 20, 2017Android studio with kotlin plugin will take a ClassNotFoundException when I run a Kotlin application(use gralde),and the reason is android studio never compile kotlin source file before launch,but java source file compiled.
ikidou says:
May 20, 2017Not ‘use gralde’ but ‘use gradle’
Noli SJ says:
May 20, 2017I’ve been saying this to those who don’t even want to listen: Kotlin is going to be a big part of Android development. Now it has become a reality.
Prithvi Raj says:
May 21, 2017Great news ! Switch to kotlin.
GeeksProgramming says:
May 21, 2017Great News !!
Android development will be lot more fun
I am tired of the NullPointerException in Java 😛
Philippe Riand says:
May 21, 2017Kotlin native for iOS and Mac OSX, why not. But why not investing on a JVM AOT instead and make all the existing Java code also available on these platforms? Do you see any issue with the multi-os engine from Intel, now back to Migeran? They do support Kotlin as well.
Another great, great enterprise platform to support is Microsoft. Many companies moved to Office 365/Sharepoint, thus targeting this environment will open a lot of doors to the Enterprise Java developer community.
shripad D Kulkarni says:
May 22, 2017Sounds interesting.. waiting for iOS support
Vaibhav Dhunde says:
May 22, 2017A great evolution in coding. This will surely help programmers to wipe out the common errors which takes hours for resolving them. Thank you so much. But yet much more is expected from Kotlin in the near future. 🙂
Nyagaka Enock says:
May 22, 2017This is good news for android developers. But i have an issue when running my Kotlin android Project. Any help about this error.
Declaring custom ‘clean’ task when using the standard Gradle lifecycle plugins is not allowed
Andrew says:
May 23, 2017This is awesome! A coworker recently wrote about his first impressions using Kotlin instead of Java for a commercial Android project – http://bit.ly/2qsPmqQ
Dwayne Mitchell says:
May 23, 2017Now that sounds to be a good news from JetBrains, especially for the developers. So now developers are no more stuck with Java as they have now an option as better as Kotlin for developing apps. Great effort by the team. Keep rocking.
tolg says:
May 24, 2017It’s my time to start develop Android app. I have kept away from developing Android app only because Java is the only choice.
Guillermo says:
May 26, 2017y para que?
Puras pajas mentales.
sabarinath s says:
May 31, 2017great news…going to develop my website app with Kotlin.
PRX says:
June 2, 2017Hi Tim,
I’m new on Kotlin.
I have try to compile android app that develop using kotlin android android studio 3.0.
When I try to compile to device, when i try to Xiaomi redmin note 4x and Xiamoi Mi5, i got message Application installed failed. But when try to Samsung A5 and Assus Zenfone everything running well.
I hope i can using my xiaomi device to try to build android app using kotlin
Rohan Sakhale says:
June 6, 2017This is one of the most exciting news for Kotlin getting official support from Android, this will make development more fun. Thanks Team 🙂
Robert Smith says:
June 8, 2017I have been working on Kotlin for couple of weeks by converting the Activities of the android app I developed java to Kotlin. Kotlin seems and feels an easier language than java. The best thing about is that I could use Java and kotlin activities side by side. So I didn’t have to convert all my Activities to Kotlin before I could test it. However, my question is I read that Kotlin a cross platform app as in Android and iOS. How does that work?
HGH says:
June 12, 2017Will there be any improvement of how C++ calls Kotlin code on Android? The Java way is horrendous.