[pianoben]

Maybe I'm wrong about the state of Java in Android today - it's been a few years since I did that work full-time. But I do remember when Kotlin broke on to the scene in 2015, and most of us were thrilled to finally move beyond Java 7! The embrace of a non-Java language was grassroots and genuine; Google's adoption came several years later.

J++ though, now that is a blast from the past! I think I still have a J# book from my student days, somewhere :)

[pjmlp]

ART is updatable via PlayStore since Android 12, however in 2026 the latest is a Java 17 subset, while the latest LTS is Java 25.

Kotlin only worked properly on Android after some folks pushed it from inside, and then they used Java 6 vs Kotlin samples to advocate for it.

In 2015 the latest Java version was 8, which never was properly supported on Android, the community had to come up with RetroLambda, before Google created desugaring support, think Babel but for Java.

Naturally it also meant that the performance of Java 8 features wasn't the same, e.g. lambdas make use of invokedynamic on the JVM, on Android they used to be rewriten into nested classes.

Even today, although Android documentation has Java and Kotlin tabs for code snippets, the Java ones are hardly taking advantage of modern features.

Naturally who learns Java on Android gets an adulterated view on the matter.

[andrekandre]

  > But I do remember when Kotlin broke on to the scene in 2015, and most of us were thrilled to finally move beyond Java 7! 

n=1 but i was there with android studio v0.01 (or thereabouts) using kotlin for a production app cause i was so sick of old-java + eclipse... google was asleep at the wheele imo and android development would be nowhere near where it is today without jetbrains

[pjmlp]

Compared to Apple and Microsoft, Android development is mostly outsourced.

None of the development environments is from Google, none of the languages as well, or the build tools for app developers (Internally they use Bazel and Soong).

Naturally having gone into bed with JetBrains for the IDE, after leaving NDK users without IDE tooling for almost two years during the IDE transition, the deal was in place to push Kotlin as well.

I am surprised Google hasn't yet bought JetBrains.