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Android mobile development has been Kotlin-first since Google I/O in 2019.

Over 50% of professional Android developers use Kotlin as their primary language, while only 30% use Java as their main language. 70% of developers whose primary language is Kotlin say that Kotlin makes them more productive.

Using Kotlin for Android development, you can benefit from:

  • Less code combined with greater readability. Spend less time writing your code and working to understand the code of others.
  • Fewer common errors. Apps built with Kotlin are 20% less likely to crash based on Google's internal data.
  • Kotlin support in Jetpack libraries. Jetpack Compose is Android's recommended modern toolkit for building native UI in Kotlin. KTX extensions add Kotlin language features, like coroutines, extension functions, lambdas, and named parameters to existing Android libraries.
  • Support for multiplatform development. Kotlin Multiplatform allows development for not only Android but also iOS, backend, and web applications. Some Jetpack libraries are already multiplatform. Compose Multiplatform, JetBrains' declarative UI framework based on Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, makes it possible to share UIs across platforms – iOS, Android, desktop, and web.
  • Mature language and environment. Since its creation in 2011, Kotlin has developed continuously, not only as a language but as a whole ecosystem with robust tooling. Now it's seamlessly integrated into Android Studio and is actively used by many companies for developing Android applications.
  • Interoperability with Java. You can use Kotlin along with the Java programming language in your applications without needing to migrate all your code to Kotlin.
  • Easy learning. Kotlin is very easy to learn, especially for Java developers.
  • Big community. Kotlin has great support and many contributions from the community, which is growing all over the world. Over 95% of the top thousand Android apps use Kotlin.

Many startups and Fortune 500 companies have already developed Android applications using Kotlin, see the list on the Google website for Android developers.

To start using Kotlin for: