Kotlin on Android

[nexxus]

Hey,

Was wondering if any Android devs could pipe in here. I just started looking at mobile dev after sitting on Python for donkey's years. Was keen on Android because I don't have any iDevices but had a proposal to do a iOS app, so spent this weekend playing with Swift. At the very least, I'll have an excuse to upgrade my ailing iPod Touch.

Static typing aside, Swift's not too bad, so started to wonder if there was anything similar for Android. Java is a pet hate of mine (I'm not gonna try to justify it, I'm aware it's irrational, I'm a hypocritical, closed minded, enterprise hating, loosely typed acolyte, leave me alone.) so I've been delaying watching the tut for a few months (or years).

The idea of cross compilation really appealed, so I've played around with Kivy and RubyMotion but they seem way too immature at the moment. More Kivy than RubyMotion, that seems to have some decent commercial backing. However, the general wisdom seems to be you either just end up maintaining 2 hackjob apps anyway or your apps are incredibly limited.

I googled Swift for Android and saw that Kotlin, which is very Swift-like and a lot of people have started using it for Android apps. Is this anything worth checking out at the moment? Anyone doing anything in Kotlin?

 

[shauntir]

Can't really say I have much experience in this space but played with Titanium Appcelerator. It uses JS so it is not staticly typed and they seem to have good documentation and examples. Got it running my my driod so you can have a look at that too.

 

[nexxus]

I played around with Titanium, but much more with PhoneGap a while ago, haven't really kept up with what's going on there. Is it worth looking at? I've since swung towards thinking individual native apps that cater to the strengths and design ideas of the platform are probably going to be better experiences.

My PhoneGap iOS app was actually not too bad, but occasionally very slow, primarily because of the crap version of WebKit that apps had access to. I suppose that's just the price of cross development.

I'm just mulling around at the moment, I reckon I'll probably just carry on down the Swift route and see where that goes, already spent a year and half vacillating about this.

 

[shauntir]

I really like the Titanium API since they offer options to access device specific calls so you can cater for IOS and Andriod appropriately. I have read that it is slow and since it is JS it can apparently cause memory leaks.

Also thinking about trying out phonegap/cordova. To be honest, it is probably best to choose one platform and dev solely for it. There is a price one pays for cross platform dev. I guess it depends on the type of app as well. Most CRUD/business type apps should be fine. Gaming and resource intensive ones would probably be better natively dev'd.

 

[semaphore]

I know a guy who has built an awesome app using RubyMotion. Definitely a decent framework.

 

[Priapus]

Swift is iOS only and is a new language developed by Apple. I write all my iOS apps in Objective-C and will move to Swift when it matures a little more. As for cross-platform, I am not a fan. Native apps always give the user the best experience.