I didn’t see this coming, but Apple’s Swift programming language is now being officially extended to support Android app development.
This is done via an establishment of a dedicated Android Working Group within the Swift open-source project. In February Apple announced that it’s making Swift Build open source. Swift is Apple’s programming language.
From the announcement: As Swift expands, there’s value in investing in matching cross-platform build tools that provide a powerful, consistent, and flexible experience across the ecosystem.
As a foundational step in this new chapter of Swift build technologies, today Apple is open sourcing Swift Build, a powerful and extensible build engine that provides a set of build rules for building Swift projects. Swift Build is the engine used by Xcode, which supports millions of apps in the App Store as well as the internal build process for Apple’s own operating systems.
…. Compared to the build engine in Xcode, the build engine in Swift Package Manager is fairly simple. On Apple platforms, having two different ways to build packages has also led to user confusion when the two implementations’ behavior didn’t match. Contributing Xcode’s build engine to the Swift project and developing it in open source alongside the Swift compiler provides the tools necessary to address these problems and deliver a great builds experience to all Swift users.[This] lays the foundation to enable new features and improvements across all platforms and tools, and unlocks new performance optimizations and developer-facing features.
In its Android Workgroup announcement, Apple says The main goal of the Android workgroup is to add and maintain Android as an officially supported platform for the Swift language.
The Android workgroup will:
- Improve and maintain Android support for the official Swift distribution, eliminating the need for out-of-tree or downstream patches
- Recommend enhancements to core Swift packages such as Foundation and Dispatch to work better with Android idioms
- Work with the Platform Steering Group to officially define platform support levels generally, and then work towards achieving official support of a particular level for Android
- Determine the range of supported Android API levels and architectures for Swift integration
- Develop continuous integration for the Swift project that includes Android testing in pull request checks.
- Identify and recommend best practices for bridging between Swift and Android’s Java SDK and packaging Swift libraries with Android apps
- Develop support for debugging Swift applications on Android
- Advise and assist with adding support for Android to various community Swift packages
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