I agree with everything you say, but that transition will take time. I think Kotlin is a great language, and combines a lot of the best strengths of others whil

I agree with everything you say, but that transition will take time. I think Kotlin is a great language, and combines a lot of the best strengths of others while not giving up that JVM tooling goodness. However, I think you still need to have good Java chops to work with Kotlin, at least to deal with those dependencies. In fact, its almost exactly the situation that TypeScript has: yes, its a good language, but you can't really use it well unless you know JavaScript (and in particular, ES6) really well. Edit: sorry, I'm really talking more generally than Android. You're probably right about hiring for Kotlin for Android instead of Java. But Kotlin is targeted at everything, and for that I think it's probably good to wait a bit.