Kotlin Momentum for Android and Beyond

Posted by James Lau (@jmslau), Product Manager

Today marks the beginning of KotlinConf 2018 - the largest in-person gathering of the Kotlin community annually. 2018 has been a big year for Kotlin, as the language continues to gain adoption and earn the love of developers. In fact, 27% of the top 1000 Android apps on Google Play already use Kotlin. More importantly, Android developers are loving the language with over 97% satisfaction in our most recent survey. It's no surprise that Kotlin was voted as the #2 most-loved language in the 2018 StackOverflow survey.

Google supports Kotlin as a first-class programming language for Android development. In the past 12 months, we have delivered a number of important improvements to the Kotlin developer experience. This includes the Kotlin-friendly SDK, Android KTX, new Lint checks and various Kotlin support improvements in Android Studio. We have also launched Kotlin support in our official documentation, new flagship samples in Kotlin, a new Kotlin Bootcamp Udacity course, #31DaysOfKotlin and other deep dive content. We are committed to continuing to improve the Kotlin developer experience.

As the language continues to advance, more developers are discovering the benefits of Kotlin across the globe. Recently, we traveled to India and worked with local developers like Zomato to better understand how adopting Kotlin has benefited their Android development. Zomato is a leading restaurant search & discovery service that operates in 24 countries, with over 150 million monthly users. Kotlin helped Zomato reduce the number of lines of code in their app significantly, and it has also helped them find important defects in their app at compile time. You can watch their Kotlin adoption story in the video below.

Android Developer Story: Zomato uses Kotlin to write safer, more concise code.

Going beyond Android, we are happy to announce that the Google Cloud Platform team is launching a dedicated Kotlin portal today. This will help developers more easily find resources related to Kotlin on Google Cloud. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to use Kotlin, whether it's on mobile or in the Cloud.

Google Cloud Platform's Kotlin Homepage

Adopting a new language is a major decision for most companies, and you need to be confident that the language you choose will have a bright future. That's why Google has joined forces with JetBrains and established the Kotlin Foundation. The Foundation will ensure that Kotlin continues to advance rapidly, remain free and stay open. You can learn more about the Kotlin Foundation here.

It's an exciting time to be a Kotlin developer. If you haven't tried Kotlin yet, we encourage you to join this growing global community. You can get started by visiting kotlinlang.org or the Android Developer Kotlin page.