Apple usually doesn’t give Android the time of day, but that’s not stopping the company’s Swift coding language from expanding over to Android app development.

As it stands today, Android apps are generally coded in Kotlin, but Apple is looking to provide its Swift coding language as an alternative. Apple first launched its coding language back in 2014 with its own platforms in mind, but currently also supports Windows and Linux officially.

In an announcement this week, Swift has opened up an “Android Working Group” which will “establish and maintain Android as an officially supported platform for Swift.”

A few of the key pillars the Working Group will look to accomplish include:

  • Improve and maintain Android support for the official Swift distribution, eliminating the need for out-of-tree or downstream patches
  • Recommend enhancements to core Swift packages such as Foundation and Dispatch to work better with Android idioms
  • Work with the Platform Steering Group to officially define platform support levels generally, and then work towards achieving official support of a particular level for Android
  • Determine the range of supported Android API levels and architectures for Swift integration
  • Develop continuous integration for the Swift project that includes Android testing in pull request checks.
  • Identify and recommend best practices for bridging between Swift and Android’s Java SDK and packaging Swift libraries with Android apps
  • Develop support for debugging Swift applications on Android
  • Advise and assist with adding support for Android to various community Swift packages

Technically, developers could already use Swift to make Android apps, but only with the help of third-party tools such as “Scade.” It was reported years ago that Google was looking to use Swift with Android, but nothing ever came of it, and Kotlin was adopted in 2017 and has been the focus ever since. Google was also at one point working to support Swift on its Fuchsia OS.

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