"Apple controls the future of the language, Google can only lose from such a relationship."

I didn't think of that, but makes perfect sense. I haven't heard of Kotlin, thanks for sharing. Personally, I think the "massive amount of work" would be worth it, considering they can afford to hire more developers.

If you ask me, anything would be better than this weird Eclipse plugin concept, not very sexy. Granted, I have not researched it more than a few hours, but if "Hello World" requires a certain bloated IDE and multiple pages of code, I want nothing to do with that. I did find DroidScript and that looks like fun, but I haven't tried it yet.

Strictly from a marketing perspective, the name "Swift" just sounds easy and intuitive, which is maybe the opposite of Java's reputation at this point.