Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development

Google today announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers.

“Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement. “Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code is written in Kotlin often means much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain.”

It was only two years ago, at I/O 2017, that Google announced support for Kotlin in its Android Studio IDE. That came as a bit of a surprise, given that Java had long been the preferred language for Android app development, but few announcements at that year’s I/O got more applause. Over the course of the last two years, Kotlin’s popularity has only increased. More than 50% of professional Android developers now use the language to develop their apps, Google says, and in the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, it ranks as the fourth-most loved programming language.

With that, it makes sense for Google to increase its Kotlin support. “We’re announcing that the next big step that we’re taking is that we’re going Kotlin-first,” Chet Haase, chief advocate for Android, said.

“We understand that not everybody is on Kotlin right now, but we believe that you should get there,” Haase said. “There may be valid reasons for you to still be using the C++ and Java programming languages and that’s totally fine. These are not going away.”