The ever-changing Android scene provides constant tools and opportunities for developers. This post presents a quick overview of the latest industry trends to supercharge your product with the best tools available in the market today.

1. Breaking free of Java 7 with Kotlin

The very first thing you learn as an Android developer is that you must use Java to code your apps. While this was the case when the android platform first launched, it is no longer entirely true. Today, we encounter a plethora of different languages that stand a chance as a Java alternative within the Android market.

Ruby, for example, has been adapted with Ruboto, while there have been efforts to use Swift with Android as well.

Kotlin, however, is the most popular alternative to Java within native Android development. Kotlin is a production ready, industry based and statically-typed programming language that runs on the JVM created by the JetBrains team. (The developers of IntelliJ, a popular IDE which Android Studio is based upon).

Kotlin offers many features that are unavailable in Java 7 as well as some sweet syntactic sugar that can make coding in Android a breeze while maintaining full interoperability with Java.

What does this mean? Simply put, you can keep using all those Java (and Android) libraries that you use and love and/or gradually migrate your existing code base since both Java and Kotlin files can be used together.

When coupling Kotlin with Anko and Android Function Extensions (two popular libraries for Kotlin), your code may end up looking like this:

Coding your app in a modern language like Kotlin can dramatically reduce your source code, resulting in an easier to maintain app and, ultimately, increase your developer’s overall happiness. Additionally, Kotlin is fully supported by Android Studio making the learning curve from Java extremely straightforward.

Even though Kotlin can provide some really cool tools for your next project, it is important to remember that using a technology less mature than Java can have its drawbacks too. Although some are very minor , like the slight compilation time increase compared to Java based projects. Others may represent considerable issues for some developers, like the APK size, which can increase noticeably when building Kotlin apps without using ProGuard.