For me, one of the core attractions to the Swift language has been the design principle that it’s a general purpose langauge – so not just about building apps for Apple devices. Having been Open Sourced back in December 2015, I think general adoption has been disappoining across the wider developer ecosystem, despite availability of the SDK on both Linux and Windows. The Tiobe Index, shows Swift outside the top 20 languages 😞 – not helped with no Swift availability on Android, which would help grow the use and ecosystem of the laguage – Android globally remains the most widely adopted mobile platform, according to sites such as statcounter.
It was great to finally see the recent announcement that Swift is now available to Android developers. The SDK which can be accessed here, and to include swift code into an Android app (which typically have a .apk archive extension and written in Java or Kotlin), as a developer, you would create a shared object library and include the swift code into the app archive.
What’s Missing ?
Whilst the introduction of the SDK is welcome, there are some elements that I think are still missing:
- UI Design – I would like to see the Swift On Android working group do more work to help developers bring swift (swiftui) to the plafrom – make it easy to build user experiences using popular IDE’s.
- Better support in the package index – most developers use the package index for their apps, it saves time – after all, why duplicate effort, somebody else has fixed the problem you have, so use with a smile (and honour those open source licence condidtions).
- Publicity – I’m hoping that we see lots more coverage of Swift on Android, that this can be a conduit to the concept that its a general purpsoe language.
In conclusion, It really is fantastic news to see Swift as a langauge expanding to other platforms, we need many more developers to take a serious look at Swift, and maybe start to consider if it is time to start using a more modern langauge than many in the market place for their projects.
