Apple’s programming language Swift now gets Android support
Apple’s in -house programming language Swift gets official support for Android. The company thus dares an unusual step into the Google-shaped terrain of Android development, which has so far been primarily dominated by Kotlin.
A lot of work necessary
Swift was originally developed for Apple’s own platforms such as iOS and MacOS in 2014, but now also supports Windows and Linux. Now with a newly founded “Android Working Group“Another big step: the establishment of Android as an officially supported platform for Swift. The working group has set itself several goals to make Swift on Android competitive.
Among other things, support for Android in the official Swift distribution should be improved and maintained-so far, unofficial tools and patches have also been necessary. Dispatch should be optimized in order to better fit into the Android working methods.
A central concern of the group is also to define the supported Android API levels and device architectures. It is also planned to establish a continuous test system that also includes Android tests when changing code. Particular attention is paid to the Android ecosystem: The group wants to develop recommendations on how Swift can be connected to the Java-based Android SDK and how Swift libraries can be efficiently integrated into Android apps. Debugging tools for Swift apps under Android are also on the to-do list.
Apps for everyone
So far, it was also technically possible to use Swift for Android apps-but only with the help of third-party tools such as Scade. Earlier considerations on the part of Google to integrate Swift in Android were in the sand. Instead, they have been consistently on Kotlin since 2017.
With the new initiative, Apple is now positioning itself more actively in the area of cross-platform development – a remarkable step in a traditionally strongly sealed corporate strategy. It remains to be seen whether Swift can establish itself on Android. However, there is an opportunity – after all, the step should make it easier to develop apps for both large mobile platforms in parallel.
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