July 21, 2020
1:24 pm

Pros & Cons of Kotlin for Android App Development

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

Kotlin adopts a sober minded strategy by excluding elements, for example, having its own form framework or bundle director since open source instruments, for example, Gradle and Maven as of now handle this well. Having its own form framework would have broken projects that as of now use Gradle and Maven.

One more sober minded approach for Kotlin was to not re-carry out the whole Java assortments system. That would have been simple, however the makers additionally needed Kotlin to be viable with the JDK assortment interfaces without breaking any current venture executions.

Another immense advantage of Kotlin is that the majority of its language plan choices zeroed in on keeping up with in reverse similarity with numerous Java and Android projects. For instance, Kotlin actually upholds Java 6 bytecode in light of the fact that the greater part Android gadgets actually run on it.

Kotlin is a Enterprise language

Kotlin isn’t the new child around. It’s been around for a couple of years, despite the fact that it wasn’t creation prepared until 2015. JetBrains created it for addressing pragmatic, genuine improvement issues. Furthermore, not at all like other JVM-based dialects, Kotlin doesn’t come from an intellectual or exploration foundation. It was worked considering the endeavor.

It is continuously enticing to revamp or re-execute everything without any preparation. JetBrains might have done that with Kotlin, however it didn’t. Its objective was not to make something progressive, yet to give something usable and recognizable to current venture designers.

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.