Kotlin, the Android language, isn't owned by Google. it's from Jetbrains. Picking Kotlin is one of a few great decisions Google has done for Android IMO.
They actually are not. Take a look at say the two most popular languages to come out of Google being Go and Dart… none of those communities ever really feel hard done by, the tooling is great, the documentation is amazing, it runs everywhere, it’s fast, it’s easy to work with, has excellent cross language interop and they are just generally well supported.
I think you’re just going on vibes here but it’s kind of bullshit when you think about it for more than a moment.
People that have been around Dart long enough absolutely felt hard done by. That project burned so much community good will on the way to finally getting slight traction with Flutter.
I’m actively a part of that community for the past 5 years and I have zero idea what you’re talking about. It’s one of the most loved languages out there when you look at surveys of its users and for good reason.
Half a decade is more than enough time for me to be able to say with a really high degree of confidence and authority that I’m positive that the situation with Google and Dart is in fact not at all like the situation with Apple and Swift as the OP was implying.
Also the Android and iOS development experiences are vastly different. Android is much more pleasant to work with. Android Studio exists but you don’t need to use it, unlike XCode. I’m very happy writing Android apps using vim and adb.
I develop for both platforms and don’t agree at all. The Android dev experience has a lot of potential to be good, but it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard, both of which regularly cause more pain for me than their iOS counterparts (Swift Package Manager and clang’s code stripper).
It’s also only been relatively recently that Google has decided it’s ok to be opinionated and provide happy paths for devs to follow in their UI library with Compose. Android Framework was/is notorious for having 5 ways to accomplish any given task and none being “right” or the only one capable of doing what you need being deprecated.
And then there’s Kotlin, which is so close to being a great language but dies on weird hills ideologically (e.g. please just give me “if let” syntax, “.let {}” is ugly and automatic unwrapping fails just enough to not be useful).
Freedom of editor is nice but doesn’t make up for the rest, at least for me.
> it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard
its crazy looking back though, when android studio first came out there was a big hope it would be better than ant but idk personally i also hate gradle with a passion...
> “if let” syntax, “.let {}”
probably guard let would be even better since it avoids indenting on the happy path but jmo
