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matsemann

What does it mean being "supported", given that one already can use Kotlin on Android?

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It means:

- being documented on https://developers.google.com

- being installed by default with the SDK

- having official tutorials provided by the Android team using Kotlin

- having code samples provided by the Android team using Kotlin

Providing the confidence to many companies out there that Google will not change Android in a way that Kotlin compiled applications would stop working.

Right, the title of the article is pretty awful and misleading. The language used at the conference was "Kotlin is now a first-class supported language". First-class supported means it gets all the treatments you mentioned above, and probably better tooling by Google for development.

You mean: Kotlin already supports Android (which is true and indeed very nice)

This is about: Android now supports Kotlin

I've never thought about it that way, nice perspective

Well, if you work in a more conservative company, you can use this as a way to get the "powers that be" to allow the use of Kotlin. It's basically an endorsement of the language by a company that everyone has heard of.

It's not just conservative companies, but also independent developers and startups that may not want to start investigating third-party languages, of which there's no shortage. Particularly if they're up against other barriers like not being experienced at Android, in which case they may not want to learn the Android frameworks AND a new language at once. Or they have to learn some new Android frameworks they didn't use before, like the camera APIs.

Kotlin has been supporting Android for a while, with the promise that the language takes Android's needs into account. For example to do not request JVM 8 as a minimum...

Kotlin has been unofficially supported already by the Android tools team for some time. Meaning that they would work with the kotlin team in order to make sure that when a tools update breaks the kotlin build tools, they can be fixed in a timely manner.

Now that it is officially supported, we might have : - idiomatic android api for kotlin (there is already 100% interop, but sometimes java's code can be better expressed in kotlin) - official android documentation in kotlin. - I guess that kotlin will focus even more on Android's support

It is not going to change anything regarding kotlin compatibility with Android. Since kotlin outputs bytecode, it would be almost impossible for Android to permanently break kotlin compatibility without also breaking 99% of all Android's libs.

Built into Android Studio without having to install anything extra seems like the main draw.

Official support will also make it easier for people to push for Kotlin in larger projects

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