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Apple stated earlier this week that it is officially working on Android compatibility for its Swift programming language. While apps for iOS and Android are often developed in Swift and Kotlin, the iPhone maker's efforts to enable Swift on Android may provide an option for developing apps for Google's operating system. Apple already supports Swift on Windows and Linux, and it has formed an Android Workgroup to ensure that the operating system remains a supported platform for Swift programming.
Swift said Android Working Group membership is open to all community members
Mishal Shah, a member of the Swift Core team, introduced the Swift Android Workgroup in a forum post on Thursday. According to the Swift website, the workgroup will promote the usage of the programming language to construct Android applications. It now has ten members, and membership is "open to anyone wishing to contribute."
The newly formed workgroup will complete numerous tasks stated on the Swift website. These include maintaining and expanding Swift support for Android, collaborating with the Platform Steering Group to create platform support levels, and enabling debugging of Swift-written Android apps.
Workgroup member Marc Prud'hommeaux (@marcprux) indicated that one use case would be the possibility to create Android and iOS apps concurrently using a same codebase. Swift may be used to develop the whole application stack, including a native user experience for Android and iOS.
It's worth mentioning that technologies like Skip already exist, allowing developers to build native Android apps while utilizing the same Swift and SwiftUI code they use to create iOS apps. The service uses Jetpack Compose to automatically generate code for Android (and its UI), allowing developers to provide optimized and "native" performance on iPhones and Android phones.
With Swift officially supporting Android as a platform, tools like Skip should improve even further, and developers should find it much easier to construct Swift-written Android apps. Developers may track the workgroup's progress on the Swift for Android GitHub roadmap and even contribute to the project.
