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Comment by Taikonerd | Hacker News Reader

I don't get Kotlin's position in rankings like this one. I've heard people say, "oh, for new Android apps, you definitely want to use Kotlin." And (I asssume?) people are writing lots of new Android apps.

But this methodology has Kotlin at 0.35% of jobs! And for that matter, Swift is not much more, at 0.38%. Why are these flagship languages for large ecosystems (Android/iOS) not more in-demand?

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I'm guessing most of those ads just ask for Android/iOS experience rather than specifying the language.

I do Xamarin (Microsoft's iOS / Android framework) and the listings often throw in Swift / Java / Kotlin. Sometime's they'll throw in React Native and Flutter even if they don't use them. The Xamarin world isn't huge and I guess they just want to try to grab the attention of as many hybrid mobile devs as possible.

We looked for a xamarin dev last year and couldn't find one. I'm not surprised listings are awkward.

I think part of it is that there are a lot more old Android and iOS apps out there that still use Java/Objective-C. These apps are probably worth maintaining and updating, but not necessarily worth rewriting. (And, you'd still need to know the old language in order to do a decent rewrite.)

For iOS where I work, we use primarily Objective-C, with only a tiny bit of Swift. We actually have more Rust code than we do Swift. (The Rust code is for our cross-platform logic that's shared between Android and iOS.)

I think the Android side is all Java with no Kotlin at all.

I recently suggested to one of my consultancy customers (valued at $500mil) that they should hire Kotlin and Swift developers to improve the quality of their React Native app.

The response I got is: "nope, we're fine employing one mid-level React dev to maintain our app in both platforms."

They don't consider mobile apps being essential for their fintech business in 2022. I'm speechless but this serves as a hint as to why we don't see more Kotlin and Swift jobs: companies are cutting corners with React.

As someone who does cross-platform frequently now, after doing native apps for a long time, that gives me anxiety for that dev lol. I can't imagine how helpless they feel to fix the 1000 random issues they run against in cross-platform land.

Its the nature of the beast, as well as the market. The web market is massive compared to native app dev and app dev teams are minuscule compared to web teams. It would look less weird if the JS/TS line was actually split into the component frameworks (i.e. Vue/Angular/React/etc).

The web is killing it? Finally? Hopefully? Copium.

Kotlin is being used as replacement for Java in many places.

I know a few companies in Minneapolis are using Kotlin instead of Java for their new microservices.

Simple: React Native

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