18 ms·

Android’s Commitment to Kotlin

104 points by WalterSobchak 7y ago

amluto 7y ago
I’m a bit surprised Google hasn’t bought JetBrains. I bet they could get it for something like $2bn, which seems like an entirely reasonable price to pay to help improve the Android ecosystem. On the flip side, Apple could buy JetBrains and seriously mess with Google, although that acquisition wouldn’t really make as much strategic sense.
- stock_toaster 7y ago
  > although that acquisition wouldn’t really make as much strategic sense I dont know... maybe if apple bought jetbrains they could get them to rewrite xcode for them. :/
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    They already did, https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
marktangotango 7y ago
So if Google wins the Oracle case, does Kotlin support cease, or is there no going back at this point?
- bilal4hmed 7y ago
  at the rate its going there is no stopping. Kotlin is a much nice experience that Java and far more projects are starting today with Kotlin rather than java
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Then they better rewrite everything in Kotlin/Native.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Dontrememberit 7y ago
If Android is "Kotlin-first", why is flutter development done in Dart?
- jrempel 7y ago
  This is the Android Dev blog. Flutter is completely separate competing team
- plorkyeran 7y ago
  Flutter is an Android competitor that happens to be made by the same company.
  - brabel 7y ago
    Flutter is for those who want to use the same code on both Android and iOS... it's not a competitor to either, it wouldn't exist without them.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      So Kotlin/Native then.
clumsysmurf 7y ago
At this point, I feel no language can compensate for the platform's out-of-date java libraries. I think Google has its priorities wrong: first should be recent java, second should be kotlin.
- navidr 7y ago
  That was always the problem with google. Look at chrome os fiasco. They had it for 6,7 years? They didn’t realized it until Microsoft did put effort to make their OS developer friendly that they should make chromeos developer friendly. Imagine how good chromeos was today if they have started to make it developer friendly in 2010 instead of 2017.
- sidlls 7y ago
  I disagree: they should just dump the whole ecosystem. Kotlin is a shabby bandaid, not because the language isn’t good (no comments there) but because the substrate is a mess of bloated, terrible, OO Java nonsense. Android development is just awful no matter the language.
  - braindongle 7y ago
    In this context of disparaging the state of Android development, I must plead: take a hard look at Flutter/Dart. There are quite a few wins with it, including a pleasant developer experience. Declarative, composable, JIT compilation in dev, AOT compilation in production. The list goes on.
    - craftinator 7y ago
      +1 for Flutter. Fast iteration, few gotchyas, decent documentation, a growing community, very fine control, but forgiving to those learning the framework.
    - nl 7y ago
      I wish they'd dump Dart and replace it with basically anything else (Typescript? Swift? Kotlin?). I'm not going to learn a new language which isn't used anywhere else AND a new UI toolkit just because Google's internal team structure has put them in a position to keep Dart going. Back when Dart came out, it made sense. But Typescript came along, filled basically the same niche and got significant mindshare.
tlarkworthy 7y ago
> Today, we’re proud to say nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android apps contain Kotlin code ^^ This precise phrasing looks like an OKR.
- edoceo 7y ago
  OKR = Objectives and Key Results. I had it look it up: ""collaborative goal-setting tool used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results"" -- among other definitions and graphs. Is this management speak about vanity metrics? What do these measurements even mean?
  - stochastician 7y ago
    https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72c7 https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72...
  - joatmon-snoo 7y ago
    For example: O: improve the usability of Kotlin KR: 90% of top 1K Android apps have Kotlin deps Q4 score: 67% (achieved 60%, goal was 90%)
  - harryh 7y ago
    The use of OKRs goes back to Andy Grove at Intel and while, like any tool, they can be misused they're definitely not just for vanity metrics. Some more useful OKRs might be things like: - Increase number of signups for our app by 10%. - Decrease the rate of customers churning off our platform by 20%. - Reduce the median time it takes to ship a product out of our warehouse from 3 to 2 days.
- xt00 7y ago
  I would be interested to know how much of that code is not boilerplate just pulled directly from google’s site explaining how to interface with X.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pabl0rg 7y ago
Kotlin is a palliative that makes android dev nearly tolerable. Flutter is way better, even though Dart is not as good as Kotlin.
efxzsh 7y ago
I read Jetpack Compose will be able to support multiplatform as well. It will be a kind of flutter possible with Kotlin. Well, it’s no surprise that google can run multiple projects that solves more or less the same thing.
FpUser 7y ago
I hold no grudge against Kotlin as the language. But underlying platform ... I'd rather prefer for them to switch to some native thing. It is really depressing to compare situations when I could whip up high performance small native GUI application and that atrocious monstrosity called Android studio produces regurgitates fat resource hogs.
- jrs95 7y ago
  It seems pretty likely that Flutter become the preferred stack at some point in the future given that it's used as the primary UI toolkit for Fuschia. That is still probably a few years away though.
  - izacus 7y ago
    This is as likely as Qt becoming a primary toolkit for Windows.
blibble 7y ago
the problem with Android is the god awful API, not Java this says it all: https://cdn1.hubspot.net/hubfs/2564010/The%20activity%20and%20fragment%20lifecycles%20(1).png https://cdn1.hubspot.net/hubfs/2564010/The%20activity%20and%... and it gets worse with every release
- kumarm 7y ago
  How is that Bad? Any Activity you have need to have proper lifecycle. Every UI Toolkit has something similar. Same events for IOS: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_environment/managing_your_app_s_life_cycle https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_envi...
  - blibble 7y ago
    no UI toolkit I've used has anything nearly as complicated or error prone it was designed for phones with 4mb of memory that need to serialise their entire state everytime a form (activity) disappears because they don't have enough memory and google were too lazy to implement it in the OS as a result you need to implement masses of error prone boilerplate crap for each and every activity, and nearly everyone gets it wrong in subtle ways rotate your screen? better implement that serialisation perfectly else the user will lose state when they rotate their device a lot of apps just disable features like rotation, because they're too time consuming to implement (and a nightmare to test)
    - ShamelessC 7y ago
      I've never understood why rotating the app resets the state like this without writing code to handle it. I mean even a lightweight website can change its interface on rotation using only CSS without losing any state. It's been several years since I messed with Android development. I assumed it would be fixed by now.
      - jabot 7y ago
        Maybe that's because the website already has a serialized state - the HTML?
sandGorgon 7y ago
All of this is flowing in from the ongoing #KotlinConf Jetpack Compose - a react like paradigm to build apps - is the future of android app development. And I could not be more excited. Kotlin Multiplatform is on track (https://twitter.com/zsmb13/status/1202507590674112513 https://twitter.com/zsmb13/status/1202507590674112513) and will let ios apps be built using android studio without a Mac. Kotlin 1.4 is touting upto 3x compiler improvements. The question here is about the future of Flutter. Why do Flutter/Dart when Android is officially throwing its weight behind Kotlin and Compose is going to be every bit as react-y as Flutter or SwiftUI.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Same applies to why ChromeOS when Android? Politics. Management is throwing money at them and watching who brings the best numbers back home, kind of thing. Although like ChromeOS was forced to eventually support Android, I imagine that Flutter will eventually loose the battle. Betting on Dart was never a clever option to start with, and now with Xamarin/WinUI, JetPack Compose and SwiftUI all demoing Flutter like experiences, it is clear that the reasoning for Dart being a special case isn't really the case.
reegnz 7y ago
When will we have a proper LSP implementation for Kotlin that is maintained not by a single person but a full blown team? JetBrains is very short-sighted about this[1], putting their own IDE-s success over the success of Kotlin: not healthy for the language if you ask me. A lot of developers using Kotlin are also gaslighting everyone who doesn't want to use IntelliJ for Kotlin as if using the editor of your choosing is some sort of madness. Kotlin needs to be a foundation, it clearly has a big community to drive the language and its accompanying tooling and integrations. Kotlin needs to be completely decoupled from JetBrains to succeed outside the JVM/java legacy areas. [1]https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/any-plan-for-supporting-language-server-protocol/2471 https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/any-plan-for-supporting-lan...
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Java, use any IDE you feel like it without any extra tooling. Kotlin, here have InteliJ, oh yeah there is also this 2nd class plugin for Eclipse, and nothing else for the others.
- smichel17 7y ago
  I write Kotlin in vim, so it's not all devs using Kotlin.
pjmlp 7y ago
Android, aka Kotlin Virtual Machine. Nowadays I keep waiting for the JetBrains acquisition news story to pop up.
Cloudgazer3d 7y ago
The main problem with java is oracle though which lobby patent trolls its way towards almost zero progress for java in the past 10 years. Sure they release java 13 now but compared with the feature-set of Kotlin and swift it's rather pathetic. Especially considering the planned price model of java 9+.
giorgioz 7y ago
Truth is Kotlin and Swift are just a form of developer lock-in. A webapp written in React inside of a chromium webview is fast enough for most apps use cases. (NO REACT NATIVE PLEASE) The fact that Javascript is improved by many parties made the tooling and the performance of Chromium very fast. Babel+Webpack are years ahead of the build systems for both Android and iOS. Sublime and Atom are much leaner and better for coding than Android Studio and Xcode.
- kuschku 7y ago
  > are fast enough for most apps use cases. If that's the case, then you don't need an app in the first place, and shouldn't develop one. We don't need apps for every online store and every website. But Android is slowly limiting the power of apps further and further, until there won't be any need for apps anymore. The whole point of apps is to interact with hardware browsers don't support, to interact with files and provide high-performance functionality. To speak protocols browsers have never even considered supporting.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    The point of apps is also to deliver a decent user experience that web pages just can't deliver.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      PWAs and mobile web can deliver a decent user experience, if the developers actually bother delivering it.
      - anoncake 7y ago
        No, not at all. A decent user experience requires using the native toolkit and behaving like an actual app, not appearing in the browser. Everything else is garbage.
        giorgioz 7y ago
netwanderer3 7y ago
What about Dart and Flutter framework?

104 points by WalterSobchak 7y ago

I’m a bit surprised Google hasn’t bought JetBrains. I bet they could get it for something like $2bn, which seems like an entirely reasonable price to pay to help improve the Android ecosystem. On the flip side, Apple could buy JetBrains and seriously mess with Google, although that acquisition wouldn’t really make as much strategic sense.

stock_toaster 7y ago
> although that acquisition wouldn’t really make as much strategic sense I dont know... maybe if apple bought jetbrains they could get them to rewrite xcode for them. :/
- pjmlp 7y ago
  They already did, https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

marktangotango 7y ago

So if Google wins the Oracle case, does Kotlin support cease, or is there no going back at this point?

bilal4hmed 7y ago
at the rate its going there is no stopping. Kotlin is a much nice experience that Java and far more projects are starting today with Kotlin rather than java
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Then they better rewrite everything in Kotlin/Native.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Dontrememberit 7y ago

If Android is "Kotlin-first", why is flutter development done in Dart?

jrempel 7y ago
This is the Android Dev blog. Flutter is completely separate competing team
plorkyeran 7y ago
Flutter is an Android competitor that happens to be made by the same company.
- brabel 7y ago
  Flutter is for those who want to use the same code on both Android and iOS... it's not a competitor to either, it wouldn't exist without them.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    So Kotlin/Native then.

clumsysmurf 7y ago

At this point, I feel no language can compensate for the platform's out-of-date java libraries. I think Google has its priorities wrong: first should be recent java, second should be kotlin.

navidr 7y ago
That was always the problem with google. Look at chrome os fiasco. They had it for 6,7 years? They didn’t realized it until Microsoft did put effort to make their OS developer friendly that they should make chromeos developer friendly. Imagine how good chromeos was today if they have started to make it developer friendly in 2010 instead of 2017.
sidlls 7y ago
I disagree: they should just dump the whole ecosystem. Kotlin is a shabby bandaid, not because the language isn’t good (no comments there) but because the substrate is a mess of bloated, terrible, OO Java nonsense. Android development is just awful no matter the language.
- braindongle 7y ago
  In this context of disparaging the state of Android development, I must plead: take a hard look at Flutter/Dart. There are quite a few wins with it, including a pleasant developer experience. Declarative, composable, JIT compilation in dev, AOT compilation in production. The list goes on.
  - craftinator 7y ago
    +1 for Flutter. Fast iteration, few gotchyas, decent documentation, a growing community, very fine control, but forgiving to those learning the framework.
  - nl 7y ago
    I wish they'd dump Dart and replace it with basically anything else (Typescript? Swift? Kotlin?). I'm not going to learn a new language which isn't used anywhere else AND a new UI toolkit just because Google's internal team structure has put them in a position to keep Dart going. Back when Dart came out, it made sense. But Typescript came along, filled basically the same niche and got significant mindshare.

tlarkworthy 7y ago

> Today, we’re proud to say nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android apps contain Kotlin code ^^ This precise phrasing looks like an OKR.

edoceo 7y ago
OKR = Objectives and Key Results. I had it look it up: ""collaborative goal-setting tool used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results"" -- among other definitions and graphs. Is this management speak about vanity metrics? What do these measurements even mean?
- stochastician 7y ago
  https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72c7 https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72...
- joatmon-snoo 7y ago
  For example: O: improve the usability of Kotlin KR: 90% of top 1K Android apps have Kotlin deps Q4 score: 67% (achieved 60%, goal was 90%)
- harryh 7y ago
  The use of OKRs goes back to Andy Grove at Intel and while, like any tool, they can be misused they're definitely not just for vanity metrics. Some more useful OKRs might be things like: - Increase number of signups for our app by 10%. - Decrease the rate of customers churning off our platform by 20%. - Reduce the median time it takes to ship a product out of our warehouse from 3 to 2 days.
xt00 7y ago
I would be interested to know how much of that code is not boilerplate just pulled directly from google’s site explaining how to interface with X.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pabl0rg 7y ago

Kotlin is a palliative that makes android dev nearly tolerable. Flutter is way better, even though Dart is not as good as Kotlin.

efxzsh 7y ago

I read Jetpack Compose will be able to support multiplatform as well. It will be a kind of flutter possible with Kotlin. Well, it’s no surprise that google can run multiple projects that solves more or less the same thing.

FpUser 7y ago

I hold no grudge against Kotlin as the language. But underlying platform ... I'd rather prefer for them to switch to some native thing. It is really depressing to compare situations when I could whip up high performance small native GUI application and that atrocious monstrosity called Android studio produces regurgitates fat resource hogs.

jrs95 7y ago
It seems pretty likely that Flutter become the preferred stack at some point in the future given that it's used as the primary UI toolkit for Fuschia. That is still probably a few years away though.
- izacus 7y ago
  This is as likely as Qt becoming a primary toolkit for Windows.

blibble 7y ago

the problem with Android is the god awful API, not Java this says it all: https://cdn1.hubspot.net/hubfs/2564010/The%20activity%20and%20fragment%20lifecycles%20(1).png https://cdn1.hubspot.net/hubfs/2564010/The%20activity%20and%... and it gets worse with every release

kumarm 7y ago
How is that Bad? Any Activity you have need to have proper lifecycle. Every UI Toolkit has something similar. Same events for IOS: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_environment/managing_your_app_s_life_cycle https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_envi...
- blibble 7y ago
  no UI toolkit I've used has anything nearly as complicated or error prone it was designed for phones with 4mb of memory that need to serialise their entire state everytime a form (activity) disappears because they don't have enough memory and google were too lazy to implement it in the OS as a result you need to implement masses of error prone boilerplate crap for each and every activity, and nearly everyone gets it wrong in subtle ways rotate your screen? better implement that serialisation perfectly else the user will lose state when they rotate their device a lot of apps just disable features like rotation, because they're too time consuming to implement (and a nightmare to test)
  - ShamelessC 7y ago
    I've never understood why rotating the app resets the state like this without writing code to handle it. I mean even a lightweight website can change its interface on rotation using only CSS without losing any state. It's been several years since I messed with Android development. I assumed it would be fixed by now.
    - jabot 7y ago
      Maybe that's because the website already has a serialized state - the HTML?

sandGorgon 7y ago

All of this is flowing in from the ongoing #KotlinConf Jetpack Compose - a react like paradigm to build apps - is the future of android app development. And I could not be more excited. Kotlin Multiplatform is on track (https://twitter.com/zsmb13/status/1202507590674112513 https://twitter.com/zsmb13/status/1202507590674112513) and will let ios apps be built using android studio without a Mac. Kotlin 1.4 is touting upto 3x compiler improvements. The question here is about the future of Flutter. Why do Flutter/Dart when Android is officially throwing its weight behind Kotlin and Compose is going to be every bit as react-y as Flutter or SwiftUI.

pjmlp 7y ago
Same applies to why ChromeOS when Android? Politics. Management is throwing money at them and watching who brings the best numbers back home, kind of thing. Although like ChromeOS was forced to eventually support Android, I imagine that Flutter will eventually loose the battle. Betting on Dart was never a clever option to start with, and now with Xamarin/WinUI, JetPack Compose and SwiftUI all demoing Flutter like experiences, it is clear that the reasoning for Dart being a special case isn't really the case.

reegnz 7y ago

When will we have a proper LSP implementation for Kotlin that is maintained not by a single person but a full blown team? JetBrains is very short-sighted about this[1], putting their own IDE-s success over the success of Kotlin: not healthy for the language if you ask me. A lot of developers using Kotlin are also gaslighting everyone who doesn't want to use IntelliJ for Kotlin as if using the editor of your choosing is some sort of madness. Kotlin needs to be a foundation, it clearly has a big community to drive the language and its accompanying tooling and integrations. Kotlin needs to be completely decoupled from JetBrains to succeed outside the JVM/java legacy areas. [1]https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/any-plan-for-supporting-language-server-protocol/2471 https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/any-plan-for-supporting-lan...

pjmlp 7y ago
Java, use any IDE you feel like it without any extra tooling. Kotlin, here have InteliJ, oh yeah there is also this 2nd class plugin for Eclipse, and nothing else for the others.
smichel17 7y ago
I write Kotlin in vim, so it's not all devs using Kotlin.

pjmlp 7y ago

Android, aka Kotlin Virtual Machine. Nowadays I keep waiting for the JetBrains acquisition news story to pop up.

Cloudgazer3d 7y ago

The main problem with java is oracle though which lobby patent trolls its way towards almost zero progress for java in the past 10 years. Sure they release java 13 now but compared with the feature-set of Kotlin and swift it's rather pathetic. Especially considering the planned price model of java 9+.

giorgioz 7y ago

Truth is Kotlin and Swift are just a form of developer lock-in. A webapp written in React inside of a chromium webview is fast enough for most apps use cases. (NO REACT NATIVE PLEASE) The fact that Javascript is improved by many parties made the tooling and the performance of Chromium very fast. Babel+Webpack are years ahead of the build systems for both Android and iOS. Sublime and Atom are much leaner and better for coding than Android Studio and Xcode.

kuschku 7y ago
> are fast enough for most apps use cases. If that's the case, then you don't need an app in the first place, and shouldn't develop one. We don't need apps for every online store and every website. But Android is slowly limiting the power of apps further and further, until there won't be any need for apps anymore. The whole point of apps is to interact with hardware browsers don't support, to interact with files and provide high-performance functionality. To speak protocols browsers have never even considered supporting.
- anoncake 7y ago
  The point of apps is also to deliver a decent user experience that web pages just can't deliver.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    PWAs and mobile web can deliver a decent user experience, if the developers actually bother delivering it.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      No, not at all. A decent user experience requires using the native toolkit and behaving like an actual app, not appearing in the browser. Everything else is garbage.
      - giorgioz 7y ago

netwanderer3 7y ago

What about Dart and Flutter framework?