Google mulling deep Android support for Apple's Swift language - report
Apple's nascent Swift programming language could have a bright future ahead with one of the company's chief competitors, as Google is reportedly considering bring Swift to Android as a "first-class" language.
Google discussed the idea of bringing Swift into Android with at least two major third-party developers -- Facebook and Uber -- according to The Next Web. Those talks are said to have taken place late last year in London, though they remain preliminary.
The search giant is thought to be feeling out potential long-term replacements for Java, over which it is embroiled in a long-running legal spat with Oracle.
Any official Android implementation of Swift would not replace Java immediately, though. Nearly every user-facing piece of the operating system would need to be rewritten from the ground up, as well as a huge portion of Android's core.
Such a move could prove attractive for developers, who would be able to more easily create native cross-platform apps.
Also under consideration for Google is Kotlin, a language designed by Java-focused development company JetBrains and designed to be interoperable with Java. Google is said to have concerns about Kotlin's speed, however, preferring Swift's "upside" over both Kotlin and Java.
Google discussed the idea of bringing Swift into Android with at least two major third-party developers -- Facebook and Uber -- according to The Next Web. Those talks are said to have taken place late last year in London, though they remain preliminary.
The search giant is thought to be feeling out potential long-term replacements for Java, over which it is embroiled in a long-running legal spat with Oracle.
Any official Android implementation of Swift would not replace Java immediately, though. Nearly every user-facing piece of the operating system would need to be rewritten from the ground up, as well as a huge portion of Android's core.
Such a move could prove attractive for developers, who would be able to more easily create native cross-platform apps.
Also under consideration for Google is Kotlin, a language designed by Java-focused development company JetBrains and designed to be interoperable with Java. Google is said to have concerns about Kotlin's speed, however, preferring Swift's "upside" over both Kotlin and Java.
Comments
It's not like Apple needs Swift endorsed by Google for the language to be a success, it's going to have widespread adoption within Apple's own ecosystem.
Though I do look forward to being able to use Swift for server side code.
Reminds me, I still say Apple need to make iMessage cross-platform. In the grand scheme of things people staying with Apple for iMessage is a small portion, and having it cross platform similar allows those Android users who become familiar with iMessage over the top the risk free opportunity to try out iOS.
Cross-platform iMessage would be an attempt to own the future of messaging vs the short term gains of keeping some users on iPhone.
Apple just need to figure out a more elegant signup process first. Something akin to how WhatsApp does registration may be a better idea.
can anyone give a good explanation?
They actually have a history of this in the past. Google let Apple do most of the work to port WebKit to Windows. Without Apple's contributions Chrome for Windows would not be possible (or extremely delayed) Now, since Google has been moving ahead with a fork of Webkit called Blink all the chrome specific code from Webkit has been removed keeping it pure on all platforms while Blink supports vendor specific code like Google but retains backwards compatibility to WebKit.
and now that Apple is the known champion of encryption and is labeled as the most secure device to own, theres even less reason to put it on android.
Any developer familiar with Swift is, by definition, a potential developer for Apple products.
Swift enables developers to write both the device (client-side) and the cloud (server-side) portions of the app in one language.
For example, I suspect that the IBM/Apple partnership is integral to this open-sourcing.
... Or, more succinctly -- why wouldn't you develop in Swift?
Since the majority of mobile development is occurring for iOS, moving to Swift would seem logical. However, such a move will strand a very substantial number of current Android users.
Perhaps this is Samsung's opportunity to push Tizen again.
More people to write code for Apple computers in particular the Linux community.
And vice versa don't forget. Apple has the most talent when it comes to developers, so has more to lose. Currently when a client asks me to write an Android version of an app, I tell them to politely jog on. But if I could write it in Swift, on occasions I might lower my standards So the winner in that scenario is Android, not Apple.