Apple Wants to Make Android Apps Better, With Swift

There are striking differences between the way iOS applications are made in relation to how Android applications are created. Namely, iOS applications are built on Swift, while Android mainly uses Kotlin. Now, however, Swift arrives on Android. And it could have enormous implications for applications in the future.

The Open-Source of Apple programming, SWIFT, officially extends its scope to the Android operating system. The initiative is carried out by an “Android working group” newly trained in the Swift project, which should be able to set up SWIFT for the development of Android applications. While the developers have technically been able to write Android applications using Swift via third-party tools, this decision marks the first time that the SWIFT project itself sanctions and supports Android.

The “Android working group” presented a clear charter with several key objectives to help Swift settle in the end as a first class citizen in the world of Android development. One of the main objectives is to improve and maintain Android support in 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 improving Swift Core packages like Foundation and Dispatch to better integrate into established idioms of the Android platform. This will be crucial to ensure that Swift applications work not only on Android but also feel from the operating system.

Related

The parameters of the Android application can become more similar to the iPhone

But will the developers really use it?

In addition, the working group will collaborate with the platform management group to officially define the level of support that Android will receive and work to meet these standards. Other critical tasks for the group include the definition of the range of supported Android API levels and processor architectures and the continuous integration establishment for the SWIFT project which includes rigorous tests on Android.

I’m not going to annoy you with the ins and outs of all this, because you are certainly not a developer. But it’s a huge business. While most of the main applications support Android and iOS, when it comes to having to choose one, the privileged option is almost always iOS. For many developers, it is the most important market to prioritize. Although this would not mean “a minimum effort” for carrying applications between iOS and Android (there are still a lot of things that will continue to postpone between the two platforms that are not only the main code base), this would rationalize things considerably and would help developers to go from an iOS application to an Android application more easily.

For the moment, we will have to wait and see how it all happens, but it is certainly promising.

Source: Swift