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Comment by Grimburger | Hacker News Reader

As someone not familiar with android development, this is somewhat confusing because I always thought Google was pushing dart/flutter for mobile these days?

Or is it both at once?

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Dart/Flutter is their React Native competitor. It’s in the same space as Xamarin - A secondary language and UI toolkit who’s selling point is rapid development for multiple platforms.

Kotlin is to Java (on Android) as Swift is to Objective-C (on Apple) - the successor primary platform language.

Thanks, that's a solid summary.

Feels like an environment that moves so quickly (to someone like me anyway). Can barely keep up.

I think it is better to compare Flutter with Apache Cordova / Ionic Capacitor, as Flutter actually has a DOM tree behind the scenes, but instead of using a Web View to render the application Flutter renders the app directly to a GPU Accelerated surface using Skia.

From talking to a Googler the reason why Google devotes resources to Kotlin is that there was and still is a large external demand from the Android development community for Kotlin.

Kotlin adoption was triggered from inside, with some anti-Java attitude.

https://talkingkotlin.com/the-first-kotlin-commit-in-android...

My information was from someone from the team working on jetpack compose. So maybe the answer I was given comes from a different context.

Not sure where you got that impression from, the Android team has never pushed, let alone mentioned, Dart/Flutter, ever. All the Flutter advertising you hear is from the Flutter team.

Kotlin and Java are the main languages supported on Android.

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