Google Makes Kotlin the Preferred Language for Android Development
Google officially names Kotlin as its preferred language for building Android apps, signaling a major shift away from Java. Over half of professional Android developers already use the language.
Google announces that Kotlin is now its preferred language for Android app developers, making Android development increasingly Kotlin-first. The company states that many new Jetpack APIs and features will arrive in Kotlin first, noting that the language requires much less code to type, test, and maintain.
This shift comes just two years after Google added Kotlin support to Android Studio at I/O 2017, a surprise move that broke Java's long-standing dominance. Since then, Kotlin's popularity surges rapidly, with Google reporting that more than half of professional Android developers now use it to build their apps.
Google emphasizes that existing Java and C++ code remains fully supported and is not going away. However, Android chief advocate Chet Haase strongly encourages developers to adopt Kotlin for new projects, noting that it currently ranks as the fourth-most loved programming language in the Stack Overflow developer survey.