Announcing the Android Workgroup | Hacker News Reader

Announcing the Android Workgroup

forums.swift.org

32 pointsdesertmonad16 comments

You can use Swift on Android today with Skip Tools. https://skip.tools/ The Skip devs are founding members of the Swift on Android working group.

When using Skip Fuse, your Swift code compiles to 100% native Android ARM code.

They've also reimplemented ~60% of SwiftUI on Android, in an open-source library, SkipUI. https://github.com/skiptools/skip-ui SkipUI works way better than you'd think, and anyway, it's totally optional.

You can just write Swift against native Android APIs and it works fine.

If Apple was really serious about combating the use of Electron and other cross-platform frameworks they would seriously support (and possibly even fund) a tool like this.

Despite the issues, if Swift and SwiftUI were available and compelling for Android then it may help to give Apple greater mindshare of developers.

If Apple cared, they would’ve just included “no cross-platform apps” in their Appstore ToS and they’d be dead the next day.

That’s how Apple fights problems these days - gatekeeping and regulation.

They don’t care though, cross platform apps bring money the same way as any app

Did they finish porting the core lib to Windows?

Foundation (the Swift Standard Library), Dispatch (the concurrency library), and XCTest (the testing framework) are all available and functional on Windows.

I remember some crucial parts were not implemented a few months ago.

Does this help LiveView Native efforts?

(naive question)

I always found non-native apps too out-of-place. Please use Swift on iOS and Kotlin on Android.

Swift is just a programming language, I thought?

Yes.

Unless I am also mistaken, they are seeking to make a supported language to android development.

Which will save mobile devs having to learn two languages, and also allow reuse of code.

Kotlin multiplatform has been around for some time if you want that. But I guess it makes sense to be able to approach it from the other end as well if you're mainly an iOS shop.

It's the only approach that can be taken, as Android being open source can make Swift a first class supported language. Apple will be apple.

Yeah Swift isn’t SwiftUI.

That's theoretically right, but all concrete examples I've seen so far use some generic UI framework that don't work well.

Why would it be any different to C or C++?

I guess it's not.

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