Nightly Swift SDK for Android
Article Summary
Joannis Orlandos just announced something that could reshape mobile development: you can now write Android apps in Swift. After a decade of Swift expanding to cloud, Windows, and browsers, it's finally landing on Android.
The Swift Android workgroup has released nightly preview builds of the Swift SDK for Android, marking a major milestone after years of community effort. This enables developers to write native Android apps in Swift and share code across iOS and Android platforms.
Key Takeaways
- Swift SDK for Android now available in nightly preview releases
- Over 25% of Swift Package Index packages already build for Android
- Swift-java project enables bidirectional interoperability between Swift and Java
- SDK works on Windows, Linux, and macOS with full tooling support
Swift developers can now build native Android apps and port existing Swift packages to Android, opening new paths for true cross-platform mobile development.
About This Article
The Android workgroup needed to make Swift and Java codebases work together seamlessly. They wanted safe, performant bindings without having to write a lot of manual boilerplate code.
The swift-java project is a library and code generator that automatically creates bidirectional bindings between Swift and Java. This eliminates the manual work of integrating the two languages.
Developers can now add Swift business logic to Android applications through automated binding generation. Mads Odgaard talked about this approach at a recent Swift Server Side meetup, showing how to bring logic to Android.