Apple's Swift Working to Support Android App Development

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Apple's Swift programming language is now being officially extended to support Android app development through the establishment of a dedicated Android Working Group within the Swift open-source project.

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Originally introduced by Apple in 2014 as a modern programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, Swift has since expanded to include official support for Linux and Windows. The Swift project this week announced a formal effort to support Android as a target platform, enabling developers to use Swift to build applications for Google's mobile operating system using official tooling and infrastructure.

According to the Swift forums, the Android Working Group's charter outlines a clear set of responsibilities aimed at integrating Android into Swift's officially supported platform ecosystem. These include ensuring Swift can be compiled and run on Android without relying on unofficial forks or downstream modifications, enhancing Swift's standard libraries for better compatibility with Android APIs, and introducing native tools and workflows for developers targeting Android using Swift.

Historically, developing Android applications using Swift has been possible only through third-party solutions such as the Scade framework or via custom toolchains created by individual developers. These approaches often required a significant amount of custom configuration, lacked full support for Android APIs, and introduced maintenance burdens due to compatibility issues with new Swift releases.

One of the primary initial goals is to improve support for Android in the official Swift distribution, removing the need for out-of-tree patches or community-maintained forks, including establishing proper toolchain integration for Android targets and obtaining consistency with other officially supported platforms. The working group also plans to recommend enhancements to core Swift libraries, such as Foundation and Dispatch, so they better align with Android platform conventions and behaviors.

Android app development is currently dominated by Kotlin, which was announced as Google's preferred language for Android in 2017.

Tags: Android, Swift

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Top Rated Comments

maszaikasza Avatar
maszaikasza
8 months ago

For those who live in these environments, what’s in it for Apple?

Is there a goal to make apps more platform independent like Java?
I really am asking because this isn’t an area I know much about.
Using a single codebase to build apps for both platforms (cross-platform development) is getting more and more popular because it can significantly reduce development costs (which are getting high AF these days). Google offers its own technologies, such as Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform, but they are not ideal - using them likely results in better apps for Android than for iOS. I believe Apple simply wants to maintain its own tools to encourage developers to use solutions that ensure higher-quality software for the iOS platform, since developers choose one technology to build for both platforms anyway.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
chrono1081 Avatar
chrono1081
8 months ago

Just. Use. React. Native.
Hell no. React is trash. Utter trash.
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
IceCool Avatar
IceCool
8 months ago
I’ve spent the last week or so working on a new app for iPhone and iPad that would also be super helpful if it were on Android too. This would make the process so much easier.
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Wrylachlan2 Avatar
Wrylachlan2
8 months ago
This is about sharing model code, not UI code. They’re bringing the open source Swift language to Android, not the proprietary SwiftUI API.

Apple’s thinking here is probably, cross-platform apps are a fact of life and by and large the coding of those cross platform apps sucks - they’re energy hogs and they shared UI is ugly. They detract from the Apple ecosystem. So if Apple can get some of those cross platform apps to share a common efficient code base for their models and then use platform specific UI frameworks on top, that’s a net win for the Apple ecosystem.
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
thejadedmonkey Avatar
thejadedmonkey
8 months ago

For those who live in these environments, what’s in it for Apple?

Is there a goal to make apps more platform independent like Java?
I really am asking because this isn’t an area I know much about.
Control of their own ecosystem.

Right now, if you want to build a multi-platform app, you pick React Native or Kotlin Multiplatform. React is ... to put it nicely, it's junk. It's basically a web wrapper, so you're limited in scope. Kotlin though, is coming along very nicely. And it will mean that developers will develop Android first, with iOS being second class. Apple does not want that. The way to fix that, is to let them easily port iOS apps to Android. Swift on Android will let them do that.

Make no mistake though, this is just step 1. Apple needs to bring SwiftUI to Android in order for iOS to not become a second class citizen, but this is a good first step.

Edit: To expand on your question about Java, Java runs in something called a Java Virtual Machine, or JVM. There's a JVM for each platform, and when you write java code it goes into the magic JVM and that runs your program.

With Swift on Android, the Swift code gets compiled to something that's native for Android (in this case, probably a special Google version of Java that doesn't use a JVM) and can run natively, at native speeds.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
roklanhavok Avatar
roklanhavok
8 months ago
This is a very good thing. What's happening now is that there are a lot of different code language providers and those are challenging languages that were previously thought to be untouchable. Rust is threatening C and C++ which has really thrown the C++ into gear to make it better. Java has a million alternatives (including Kotlin). When Apple stopped using Objective C, it immediately died because it absolutely was not worth using for anyone else. Apple trying to make Swift work outside of Apple is one way of making sure the language is not accidentally rotting and they're not realizing it because people are forced to use it. If they can get interest from people outside of Apple it proves the language has merit.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
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