Android developers love Kotlin. Google can tell us that 27% of the top 1,000 Android apps are built using Kotlin or that developers who are using it have a 97% satisfaction rate and that's great.
But we've also had developers tell us in person that they not only love it, but it's also changed how much time they need to spend doing the "boring" part of building an app. That gives them more time to do things like polish the user experience or add small details that make a great app stand out.
Kotlin helps make the tedious parts of building Android apps fewer and farther between.
When a one-man dev team can see the same benefit as a big player, that means a thing is pretty darn good. Part of what makes Kotlin work so well for writing Android apps is Google's support. Google treats Kotlin as a primary ("First class" in its own words) language in Android Studio and all the official Android developers' documentation. This includes examples and tutorials as well as code camps and even a complete — and free — Udacity course. If you know how to code in Java, you'll be up and running with Kotlin in no time.
After seeing the success of Kotlin for Android development, Google is moving it to the cloud with the Kotlin on Google Cloud Platform portal.
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.
Like Kotlin on the Android platform, Google is offering a complete SDK for Google Cloud and tutorials to guide you through doing things like building a backend for your app or using Kotlin to deploy Google App Engine. It also promises a full set of APIs and code libraries for Kotlin on Google Cloud Platform to help make moving a project from another language to Kotlin or building a new Kotlin project from scratch easier and worth doing.
Programming languages and developer tools to use them don't really mean much to end-users like ourselves. But they do make life easier for the developers when they're done right. Google looks to be learning from mistakes it sees in its own past as well as the things Apple and Microsoft are doing that could be improved and it's partnership with JetBrains to establish the Kotlin Foundation is one way it wants to fix them.
For us, it all just means better apps. Who doesn't love better apps?
