Summary
- Swift is extending to Android, with a new group to facilitate official support and better integration with Android OS.
- The Android Working Group aims to eliminate unofficial versions of Swift, enhance core packages, and define Android support.
- This move could facilitate easier app porting from iOS to Android but still requires further development and testing.
There are stark differences between how iOS apps are made vs how Android apps are made. Namely, iOS apps are built on Swift, while Android mostly uses Kotlin. Now, though, Swift is coming to Android. And it could have huge implications for apps going forward.
Apple’s open-source programming language, Swift, is officially extending its reach to the Android operating system. The initiative is being spearheaded by a newly formed “Android Working Group” within the Swift project, which should be able to get Swift set up for Android app development. While developers have technically been able to write Android apps using Swift through third-party tools, this move marks the first time the Swift project itself is officially sanctioning and supporting Android.
The “Android Working Group” has laid out a clear charter with several key objectives to help Swift ultimately establish itself as a first-class citizen in the Android development world. A primary goal is to improve and maintain Android support within the official Swift distribution, which would eliminate the need for developers to rely on unofficial or modified versions of the language. The group will also focus on enhancing core Swift packages like Foundation and Dispatch to better integrate with the established idioms of the Android platform. This will be crucial for ensuring that Swift apps not only run on Android but also feel native to the operating system.
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But will developers actually use it?
Further, the working group will collaborate with the Platform Steering Group to formally define the level of support Android will receive and will work to meet those standards. Other critical tasks for the group include defining the range of supported Android API levels and processor architectures, and establishing continuous integration for the Swift project that includes rigorous testing on Android.
I’m not going to bore you with the ins and outs of all of this, since you’re surely not a developer. But this is a huge deal. While most major apps support both Android and iOS, when it comes to having to choose one, the favored option is almost always iOS. For many developers, it’s the most important market to prioritize. While it wouldn’t mean “minimal effort” for porting apps between iOS and Android (there are still a lot of things that will continue to differ between both platforms that aren’t just the main codebase), it would greatly streamline things and help developers go from an iOS app to an Android app more easily.
For now, we’ll have to wait and see how this all turns out, but it’s certainly promising.
Source: Swift
