Why Use Kotlin for Building Android Apps?

Kotlin is an officially supported language for building Android apps and this announcement came out at the Google I/O 2017.

Kotlin isn't a language that was created a few months back, it has been around for 6 years. The creator of this language is JetBrains, the company that provides the best IDE's like IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm for developers. Kotlin already has a considerable user base and these numbers will rise in the coming years.

According to a prediction by Realm (the company behind the mobile-friendly database), Kotlin will overtake Java in December 2018 as the preferred language for Android app development. The report pointed out that the Android developers that are hesitant to learn Kotlin will face the same fate as the dinosaurs.

Those are pretty harsh words, but if Oracle keeps creating issues, then Google will continue to push for better support for Kotlin.

Many in the developer community see the current situation of apps building with Java or Kotlin for Android platform to apps building with Objective C or Swift for the IOS platform and think Kotlin will replace Java soon.

If any of those predictions come true, you don't want to be on the wrong side. It is best to familiarize yourself with Kotlin so that if your company requires it for the new project or your new company prefers apps build with Kotlin, you won't feel you are left behind.

There are already well-known companies like Foursquare, Netflix, Pinterest, Square, Trello, Uber and more that use Kotlin not just for their Android apps but also for server side.

There are many advantages using Kotlin. Kotlin reduces boilerplate code, skipping null pointer exceptions, support for lambda expressions, no performance overhead, extensions and more.

Kotlin is interoperable, which means you can use both Java classes, Kotlin classes side by side in the same project and call the Java classes, its methods from Kotlin class and Kotlin classes, its methods from Java class.

We will come across these advantages and will discuss them in detail once we start building apps.

So, if you decided to take a look at the programming language, Android Studio 3.0 has built-in support for Kotlin development. With it, You can Create Your First Android Project with Kotlin.

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