June 10, 2023

Android development in 2023

The game now is Kotlin and Android Studio. I looked at this briefly just over a year ago (back in 2022). I did little more than install Android Studio ("Dolphin" 2021.3.1) and play with it just a little. Now "Flamingo" seems to be the mainstream release (although but Giraffe and Hedgehog come after and are available).

Android Studio still supports Java, so if you want to work on an old Android Application you can still build (and modify) it as Java source.

As everyone knows, Java sucks. Kotlin is a much nicer and modern language, so I feel a strong pull to do any new work using Kotlin and ultimately to convert my old application code to Kotlin. I was at first alarmed by the change, but now I fully understand and embrace it.

Just recently I described Java coding as being like "scrubbing latrines in a Gulag". Given that sort of imagery, I would describe Kotlin as "a fun day skiing with friends".

I first began doing Android development back in 2012 using Java and ADT. I revisited things in 2017 using the same tools to make some changes to my application. Now in 2022, my copy of ADT no longer runs. This has forced me to look at updating my development tools and I find that there have been many changes.

Kotlin on Fedora - Kotlin/native -- the Kotline language

Android studio was easy enough to install, but what about compiling and running Kotlin outside of Android? This could be useful for small scale experiments at the very least.

This took me in directions I hadn't expected (in particular Kotlin/native). My notes on all of this is here, along with general notes about the Kotlin language that are Android agnostic.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]