The most important announcement made by Google was the first-class support for Kotlin on Android.  This is similar to Swift for iOS development, Kotlin has been able to bring up a number of questions. Above all, business owners and proprietors who are running successful apps. They are the ones that are only willing to enter the Android market. All that they want to know if it makes sense to use the newly adopted programming language Kotlin over the traditional stack.
 
What is important that you should Know About Kotlin? (Pros & Cons of Kotlin)

Kotlin is a programming language that is increasingly powerful. It is a statically-typed programming language. This language runs on Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This was built by the JetBrains company, the development company that was behind TeamCity, YouTrack, and a number of IDE solutions, the Kotlin language is completely open-source.

The language is not relatively or quite new. However, the interest of developers for Kotlin peaked a couple of months ago. This was due to following the announcement about its official support as first-class Android development language at Google I/O 2017.

Slowly but surely this language rose in popularity and the language, for the first time entered into the top 50 languages in June, according to TIOBE Index, over 30 positions up since May.

The language is rapidly gaining adoption. According to the information that is given on the official website of the language. Some of the leading technology companies, including Atlassian, Pivotal, as well as giants like Uber, Pinterest, Evernote, are actively using and implementing Kotlin for their Android apps.

If you as a business owner are considering joining the lineup, make sure you are aware of the benefits as well as possible pitfalls of this technology. Here are some of the insights into the Kotlin programming language that might interest you.

Pros & Cons of Kotlin

The Pros of Kotlin

Judging by some of the most recent feedback, developers and programmers seem to love Kotlin. Kotlin has announced the first-class language for Android. Kotlin is able to offer a number of improvements as compared to its 22-year old predecessor. So, here are some of Kotlin’s advantages:
 

1. Increases Your Team’s Productivity

Being Java-based language, Kotlin, however, eliminates the unnecessary as well as obsolescence and cumbersomeness of its predecessor. The language is known to be compact, clear and efficient. It provides developers with a concise and intuitive syntax. As a result because of this, Kotlin can significantly increase team productivity: Programmers told us that it takes less time to write and deploy new code. This directly or indirectly is able to contribute to better code maintainability at scale.

Take the example of, converting the “App Lock” app from Java to the newer language, Kotlin, reduced the total lines of code by 30%, as reported by A. J. Alt, Android developer at Keepsafe.
 

2. Compatible With Existing Code

One of the major as well as the most well known strong points of Kotlin is that its 100% Java interoperability. The language has been designed to works well with Java itself. This includes all related tools and frameworks, which provide a rich ecosystem. Moreover, this makes it possible for developers and programmers to gradually migrate to Kotlin, or to successfully use both languages within the same project.
 

3. Maintainability

Built and supported by JetBrains, the company behind Kotlin, Kotlin has stellar support for a number of IDEs, and this includes Android Studio. Using familiar as well as tried and true development tools also contribute to developer productivity as well as gives higher satisfaction.

Also Read: Kotlin vs Java- What to Choose for Android Development

4. Fewer Bugs (and Less QA Time)

Kotlin has a clear codebase.  Kotlin allows for less errors and more stable code in production. The compiler for Kotlin is able to detect all possible errors at compile-time, not at run time. This provides the ability to make Kotlin a safer alternative for Java.
 

5. Reliable

Compared directly to Swift, Kotlin is a mature language. Kotlin has gone through multiple Alpha and Beta stages before its final 1.0 release. The latest release is also fully and reversely compatible with the previous language versions.
 

Cons of Kotlin

However, there are many different pitfalls that you need to consider before going all-in with Kotlin in production.

• Being very close to Java, many developers discover that Kotlin still differs in many aspects. Thus, a certain learning curve is involved for a developer or programmer who wants to switch between languages. Thus, additional investments in training and time must be done.
• Some developers and programmers reported slower compilation speed as one of the main and major drawbacks of Kotlin. In some cases, Kotlin is able to beat Java in compilation speed, but sometimes it is significantly slower than its predecessor.
• While Kotlin is rapidly growing in its adoption and usage as the first-class language for Android. It still has a small developer community compared to Java. This leads to limited resources that are available for learning the language as well as training the developers. This thus makes finding the answers to any questions that might arise in the process of app development difficult. Take for instance, searching for Kotlin on StackOverflow returns just over 3,600 posts tagged with Kotlin. Compared to over 1,000,000 Java-related posts.
• As Kotlin is still relatively new to most of the developers and programmers, it might be hard to find experienced professionals in this domain. According to information that is available on indeed.com. The number of job postings featuring Kotlin skyrocketed after Google I/O.

Read More: Pros and Cons of Android App Development

Conclusion:

So now you know the Pros & Cons of Kotlin used for android app development. If you are looking to hire kotlin developers for your project then simply contact us at enquiry@nimapinfotech.com with your requirements. We have experienced developers ready to onboard your project with a full satisfaction guarantee.

In 2019, Google announced that Kotlin can be used as the language of choice for Android app development. Because of this announcement, this has led to draw the attention of some of the worlds leading brands to adopt and use Kotlin as the language for the development of apps on the Android platform. The popularity of Kotlin has been growing ever since this announcement.

This has influenced a lot of specialists to predict the collapse of Java as we know it as far as mobile development is concerned. We got to the root of the topic to see how Kotlin VS Java fares so that you are able to see how the two stack up against each other and who is the winner.

Kotlin VS Java Performance

When you choose a programming language for development purposes, the most important aspects to consider is the performance, we need to determine which language makes the apps work better. The byte code structure is easily comparable with that of Java, which can make apps run equally faster than the one written in Java. So looking at the surface there is clearly no frontrunner in this category. However, when we look closely, we are able to see that Kotlin provides full support for inline functions which enables the code that incorporates lambdas to run much faster than the one written in Java. Having said this, ultimately the code that is written by developers will majorly decide how fast the app will run. This is simply because the byte code is very similar.

Kotlin can be the key in order to make your development teams function like well oiled machines. A class that consists of 50 lines of code when using Java can only be written with a single line of code using Kotlin. When we look at the history of Kotlin, especially for which purpose it was invented by JetBrains, the major goal was to increase the productivity levels, yet it was still not possible to rewrite everything using Kotlin. That is the sole reason why it was made operational with Java. For example, Java Frameworks can work together and interoperate with Kotlin libraries.

Kotlin VS Java Android Development

It has been no secret that pretty much all Android app is developed using Java. However here are a few of the main reasons why you should consider using Kotlin:

• Java has become OutDated: Java has not been able to keep up with the times, and that too even with the release of Java 8, and because of this, many experts consider this to be a monumental leap for them. Still, Android only supports just a handful of Java 8 features, so this needs to be clear about how developers can take full advantage of this platform.
• Language Issues: Java’s language issues have been able to receive a lot of attention with respect to things such as null-safety, no extendibility and it even does not support functional programming features.
• Syntax Issues: When we directly compare to some of the more modern platforms that are out there, what really stands out is how verbose the language is. This another disadvantage in terms of how outdated the language really is.

Kotlin Advantages

If the above-listed reasons are not convincing enough, there are many more features that Android development services are taking the benefit from. Since Kotlin requires fewer lines of code this makes it much safer to use than Java because using this improves the readability and enables engineers to handle the code much more efficiently. This reduces the likelihood of making a mistake while writing the code, and the compiler makes it much easier to discover bugs in the code and eliminate runtime errors. All of this makes errors less costly and very easy to fix.

With Kotlin the code base is much smaller and this helps to improve the code clarity and quality since this can make technical debt avoidable. If developers are running late on a specific deadline, they often cut corners as far as programming is concerned. This makes compromises on the quality of code being produced and thus hampers productivity. The good news is that using a smaller code base all of these problems can be avoided if everything is implemented correctly. This is another side effect of the conciseness that Kotlin brings to the table. In general, if the developers get fewer things to write, the fewer mistakes they are likely to commit.

The development community of Kotlin is growing day by day. It is an open community that is highly responsive. Thus this enables the flow of information and expertise from one developer to another to get the most demanding and challenging questions answered. There are many resources that are available to developers for sharpening their skills and there are thousands of questions on StackOverflow regarding Kotlin and how to use it, thus making it a wonderful resource to use when it comes to usability.

Also Read: Java vs NodeJS

Conclusion:

It is indeed that Kotlin is the future for Android app development. With its abundance of community support and learning materials that you can find online, app developers can use Kotlin to develop apps for the Android platform. Kotlin is considered a successor to Java for Android app development.  You can get multiple benefits when you use Kotlin for your android app. You can also hire java developer in Dubai for your android app development. If you are looking to develop an Android app for your business then you should contact us at enquiry@nimapinfotech.com with your requirements. We have the most talented developers ready to be taken onboard for your development project endeavors.