Google declares KOTLIN as the official language for Android development

Kotlin can be used instead of Java in Android mobile development, for simpler and cleaner code with way less bloat.
It can be exciting but also a little daunting for any programmer to jump from a language you’ve come to understand in great detail over years of practice into something totally new. Especially when it’s for a commercial project, and you know your code will eventually be put to the test by millions of users.
But that’s what happened recently when, along with our client’s internal development team, we made the decision to use Kotlin for a commercial Android project — instead of Java.
In Android development circles, Kotlin is being compared to Java in the same way that Swift has been compared to Objective-C. Like Swift, Kotlin is simple, clean and removes a lot of the code bloat from Java. Kotlin also adds some needed features that Java doesn’t yet support in Android.
We’d heard great things about Kotlin since it arrived on the scene in 2011, but like many new languages, it took a few years to be ready for commercial use. We’d experimented with it for internal projects and during hackathons. But the true test came shortly after Kotlin 1.0 arrived in February 2016: With more than 300 commercial projects completed, we at ArcTouch made the commitment to use Kotlin on a client project for the first time.