From Newsgroup: comp.mobile.ipad


There might be some app developers interested in this (although they
probably already know about it).


Developers Can Now Make Android Apps With Apple's Swift
-------------------------------------------------------
The first preview release of the Swift SDK for Android was published
this week, allowing developers to build Android apps in Swift with
official tooling and making it easier to share code across iOS and
Android.

The SDK enables Android apps to be built in Swift using officially
supported tooling rather than community workarounds. In June, it
was announced that Apple's Swift programming language would be
officially extended to support Android app development through the
establishment of a dedicated Android Working Group within the Swift
open-source project.

Android interoperability is handled by swift-java, which can
automatically generate bindings between Java and Swift so
developers can use Swift code alongside existing Android APIs and
Java code. The Swift Package Index now marks packages with Android
support and says over 25% of all packages already build on Android,
giving developers a base of reusable code.

The Swift SDK for Android is already available in nightly preview
form bundled with the Swift for Windows installer or as a separate
download for Linux and macOS users. A new Getting Started guide with
end-to-end setup instructions and a set of example Android projects
written in Swift to illustrate complete workflows is also available.
Getting Started Guide: <https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/swift-sdk-for-android-getting-started.html>


The group is preparing a vision document to set future priorities
and is tracking progress on a public project board.



<https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/26/developers-can-make-android-apps-with-swift/>





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From Newsgroup: comp.mobile.ipad

Your Name wrote:

<https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/26/developers-can-make-android-apps-with-swift/>

Thanks for posting this timely information, as the more we know about the
two platforms, the better our decisions will be. This is apparently useful
for iOS app developers who want to also port their apps to Android.

Before this, if a developer built an iOS app in Swift, bringing it to
Android meant rewriting most of the chunks of the code in Java or Kotlin.

With Swift officially supported on Android, developers can reuse much of
their existing Swift codebase. But they still need to build
Android-specific user interfaces, but the core components can be shared.

Swift is just a programming language, so this means developers can now
write parts of Android apps in Swift instead of being forced to use Java or Kotlin.

The developer will likely still use Android Studio to create the Android
app.

Writing Swift code in Xcode is free, but to publish apps on the App Store, developers must pay Apple's $99/year developer program fee (compared to Google's one-time $25 fee for life).

Both are free though if all you want to do is put your own apps on your own device, but Apple's restriction is that your app dies every single week.

Meanwhile, the Android app lasts forever.
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