State of Kotlin for Android
summary
Android commits to Kotlin-first: tooling changes (bundled Kotlin plugin, incremental compilation in Kotlin 1.3.30), optimizer work (D8/R8 as default shrinker in Android Studio 3.4, newer R8 in 3.5 beta), and library integrations (Room suspend DAO support, viewModelScope, coroutine WorkManager worker, LiveData coroutine builder). Coroutines service‑loader slowdown gets patched (coroutines 1.3.0 milestone plus R8 rules). Adoption hits about 44% of top 1000 apps. Experimental UI work appears as jetpack compose with a Kotlin compiler plug‑in.
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chapters (27)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:50Why Kotlin
- 7:06Kotlin friendliness
- 8:05Kotlin runtime performance
- 10:42Kotlin write optimization
- 12:34Kotlin lambda optimization
- 13:51Quarantines on Android
- 15:24Which solution was chosen
- 16:10Fixing the service loader
- 17:54Introducing a new language
- 18:55Two years later
- 19:29Kotlin Documentation
- 21:07Language Switcher
- 21:30Reference Docs
- 22:07Developer Outreach
- 22:53Kotlin on Medium
- 23:23Kotlin Everywhere
- 24:36Internal Kotlin
- 25:29Kotlin adoption
- 25:53Android KTX
- 27:19Android Jetpack
- 29:41ViewModel
- 32:17Learn more
- 32:35Jetpack compose
- 33:16Custom Kotlin compiler
- 33:59UI patterns
- 34:22Whats next
