Swift is Coming for Android

The Swift Programming language was originally created for Apple’s platforms, but it’s open source and was ported to Windows in 2020. But now it’s coming for the biggest platform of them all, Android.

“We are excited to announce the creation of the Android Workgroup,” Swift.org manager Mishal Shah writes. “The primary goal of the Android workgroup is to establish and maintain Android as an officially supported platform for Swift.”

Apple engineer Chris Lattner created Swift in 2010, and Apple announced its adoption as a replacement for the aging and archaic Objective-C language in 2014. After the Swift 2.0 release in 2015, Apple open sourced the language, initially for its platforms and Linux, under Swift.org. And as noted, a Windows port was introduced in 2020. The most recent version is Swift 6.1, which arrived in March.

According to the charter for the Android workgroup on Swift.org, the Android port will also involve enhancing core Swift packages to work better with Android idioms, determining which Android API levels and architectures are compatible, ensuring that the Android version is kept up to date with language enhancements, and figuring out how to bridge the Java SDK used on Android, and how to package Swift libraries with Android apps. The end game? Android app development with Swift instead of Google languages and toolsets like Kotlin.

This is very interesting. I’ve looked at Swift on and off since its introduction, and unlike Objective-C, which was always terrible, I have nothing but good things to say about it. What Android and other non-Apple platforms won’t ever get, of course, is Apple’s SwiftUI, a functional and declarative app framework. (In the Microsoft space, Swift is like C#, a programming language, while SwiftUI is like WPF, the Windows App SDK, or MAUI, though it works across all of Apple’s platforms.)

You can learn more about Swift on Swift.org, of course, but Apple also has a dedicated site for the language and a nice Swift Pathway for beginners with access to a Mac and Xcode.