DECEMBER 18, 2019

Kotlin vs Java: Which Technology You Should Choose for Android App Development

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• By: Priyadarshini Nayak
• Android App Development

Seeing that Kotiln announced by Google as the official language for Android development in 2017, a question arises which technology is better for Android App development. Programmers who want to choose their profession as Android Developers are in a dilemma of choosing Kotlin or Java.

According to android experts, Java is best for beginners who want to learn Android development but, then Kotlin is an advanced technique especially, for java developers who want to jump into the lucrative market of Android app development. Commonly, Java is probably your go-to language for building Android apps if you are an android app developer. But one of the new languages called Kotlin is coming up all over the place that may challenge Java’s dominance in the Android world. Kotlin is considered a mature ecosystem, and its acceptance grows rapidly especially, on the mobile development scene.

Now, let’s talk about a detailed comparison between Kotlin and Java to help you decide which language works best for the Android development project.

What is Kotlin?

Kotlin is an open-source yet programming language for JavaScript and Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and for this reason, it can use virtually anywhere as Java used. Kotlin includes server, client, web, and Android development and is officially supported by Google for Android development. Kotlin has always been included as an alternative to the standard Java compiler ever since, the announcement of Android Studio 3.0 in 2017.

Kotlin is popular among developers due to its clean language design and powerful features such as not to introduce new concepts, but to bring together programming language features, which have proved to be beneficial for large-scale projects. Some of the mobile products like Pinterest, Twitter, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Trello, Kickstarter, and Evernote are started switching to Kotlin for Android applications. Moreover, Kotlin is known as a one-stop language for all application areas and developed by JetBrains, who currently working to bring Kotlin to embedded systems and iOS systems.

Advantages of Kotlin

• Faster to write, and thus, much loved by developers. It takes 1-2 lines of code in Kotlin, which means there much fewer errors, and bugs appear.
• Aids in the building of clean APIs.
• Kotlin has the much needed null in its type system. Android uses null to represent the absence of a value, and Kotlin lets you use null, greatly easing that pain point.
• The Anko library available for Kotlin is of great help for developers, and a wide collection of projects on Github.

                                                    (Image Source: Whatech.com)

What is Java?

When it comes to Android app development, Java is one of the preferred programming languages of many developers because Android used to be written in Java only. Java is the oldest yet easiest language, which has been at the top for more than two decades. It is an object-oriented programming language (boasts the title of the second most active language on GitHub) and developed by Sun Microsystems, which is currently owned by Oracle. Apart from developing Android applications, Java can help you to become a part of the bigger Java community and provides you a lot more career opportunities.

Advantages of Java

• Best programing language to learn and understand easily.
• Works fine for both native as well as cross-platform.
• Built with a wide open-source ecosystem.
• Java apps are lighter and more compact, thus, resulting in a faster app experience.
• Java produces a faster build process too, letting you code more in less time.

                                                 (Image Source: Theserverside.com)

Comparison between Kotlin and Java

A comparative study of Kotlin vs Java based on certain parameters are as follows:

• Compilation time: Kotlin’s compilation speed time is slower than Java’s compilation. Java’s compilation time is comparatively fast.
• Null safety: Kotlin has an inbuilt null safety feature, which is largely responsible for Android development mistakes. Android generally relies on Null to represent the absence of a value, but it can easily destroy an application, and Kotlin easily solves this problem by incorporating inherent null safety. This helps many developers to save from writing extra code to work around the issue. But, Java does not support Null safety as this incorporated in recent updates.
• Development speed: Code development speed for both Kotlin and Java is fast, but Java’s code development speed is much faster than Kotlin.
• Lambda expressions: Kotlin supports Lambda expressions that are essentially anonymous functions and can treat as values. You can pass those as arguments to methods, return them, or do any other thing you would do with a normal object. Java does not support lambda expressions.
• Community support: Kotlin has limited learning resources, and therefore it is a small and new community. But Java is a vast programming language, hence its community circle is bigger than Kotlin.

Have a look at a brief comparison in a tabular form.

Kotlin vs Java

Final Say

Now we hope you are clear with a comparison blog of Kotlin vs Java. If you want to learn more about these technologies, register online at https://edu.varistor.in/ to join our workshop. Cheers!!