At the 2019 I / O Developers Conference, Google announced that the Kotlin programming language is now the language of choice for Android app developers - new Jetpack APIs and libraries will be published first on Kotlin.
“If you start a new project, you have to write it in Kotlin: code written in Kotlin usually means much less code for you (mobile developers) - less code to type, test, and maintain,”
says Google. According to the company, Android development will increasingly become Kotlin mobile development.
Intrigued? Let’s see the details!
What’s so great about Kotlin mobile development?
At the moment, Kotlin is definitely at the peak of its popularity and can bring a lot of benefits in testing.
Kotlin is a fairly young language that is being developed and sponsored by JetBrains. From open sources, you can find out that more than $15 million was invested in the development of the language, and the language itself is another way to popularize the company and further increase sales for Idea.
The language began to gain popularity after Hans Dockter, CEO of Gradle, announced at the JavaOne 2015 conference that Kotlin was getting official support for writing Gradle build scripts.
Then it was still in beta, but the news stirred up all those who were not indifferent. The hype wave began to rise already at that moment. The language reached its peak of popularity in May 2017 at the Google I / O conference, where it was announced that Kotlin, along with Java, was becoming the official development language for the Android platform.
Immediately after that, Twitter drowned in posts about the new language. There were a bunch of blog posts with declarations of love for it. JetBrains representatives in various sources began to declare that Kotlin is the future of JVM development.
Now we offer you to check out 10 amazing Kotlin mobile app development cases. Please, enjoy it!
10 Examples of Apps Developed with Kotlin
1. Amazon Web Services - cloud platform made with Kotlin
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most widely deployed cloud platform with over 175 full-featured data center services around the planet. Millions of customers, including the fastest-growing startups, the largest corporations, and leading government agencies, use AWS to reduce costs, increase agility, and accelerate innovation.
The benefit they found with Kotlin mobile development was performance. Now it provides the widest functionality for its services. For example, AWS offers a variety of databases to choose from, tailored for different types of applications, so that a customer can find the right tool to work efficiently and cost-effectively.
2. Netflix - millions of videos in one click
How did Netflix manage to create such a stable and fast system for millions of users around the world? The developer Mayukh Nair spoke about the architecture of the service.
This service plays about 250 million hours of video per day for 98 million users in 190 countries. At this scale, it is not easy to quickly deliver quality content to every user. Such a huge audience means building unique infrastructure, negotiating, and compromising with many stakeholders, from content companies to ISPs that deal with all Netflix traffic.
Talking about the app, Kotlin has an intuitive syntax, which greatly improves the productivity and speed of Kotlin developers. It is perfectly consistent. Writing an application now takes fewer lines and less time. Many praise Kotlin for its quality, brevity, and readability, which has become its competitive advantage over Java.
3. Uber - Kotlin app that saved the transport industry
Another real giant and simply one of the most popular taxi and food delivery services - Uber/Uber Eats.
Did you know that in 2015 Rob Sadow saw a huge challenge in the transport industry:
- 85% of working people independently traveled to work by car every day.
- At the same time, they emitted 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide.
Rob wanted to fill that gap and launched his application. Four months after launch, it had over 20,000 rides through the app and received $ 5.2 million in investment.
But why did they use Kotlin ios development? Uber uses Kotlin for building internal tools. On top of that, the Kotlin code is open to all developers who want to work with it. Its implementation in the project is also absolutely free. In addition, the source code makes it possible to easily find and indicate the problem in case of its occurrence, in order to inform the developers of the language about it.
4. Pinterest - how to boost your core business metrics with Kotlin
Pinterest started Kotlin mobile development because of the global growth plans that led them to the mobile web.
After analyzing the use of the mobile version of the site by unauthorized users, they saw that their old and slow site was able to attract only 1% of users to register, authorize or install a native application. They had a great opportunity to improve conversions, so they decided to hire Kotlin developers.
In three months, Pinterest redesigned its site with React, Redux, and webpack. Moreover, they finished their app reformation. The Java developers were tasked with using all their knowledge and experience to the maximum. So, all the necessary libraries were available to programmers.
As you may know, you can write modules in Kotlin, and they will work great with Java because both languages can be used in the same project. For companies with a large Java code base, this has become a big plus.
Its update has boosted some of its core business metrics: time users spend on the site has increased by 40%, ad revenue has grown by 44%, and activity metrics have increased by 60%.
5. Coursera - easier learning with Kotlin experience
The well-known Coursera is no less popular. Here you will find more than 2 thousand courses, about 140 universities from different countries of the world, and participate in the project. Lectures can be watched both online and downloaded to view later offline. The application itself is free of charge. However, in order to receive a certificate of the discipline listened to, you have to pay.
Apart from using the Kotlin code, you can also learn it on this platform. The mobile designers of this app were greatly amazed by the functionality of this code.
This language is very convenient both for those who have been working with code for many years and for novice programmers. Kotlin's syntax reflects the innovativeness of the language. It is extremely laconic, compact, and understandable.
Coding guidelines help developers find minor bugs that are difficult to spot before running the program. The most common pitfall in many programming languages is the attempt to access null values. This results in an error. Kotlin aims to eliminate these kinds of errors from your code. That’s mainly why Coursera’s app works without flaws.
6. Square - Kotlin-powered electronic payments
An American technology company that develops solutions for accepting and processing electronic payments must have a decent and reliable app. And that’s 100$ truth.
The Cash App mobile application from payment company Square now has a feature to automatically purchase Bitcoin for US dollars. Users can schedule the purchase of cryptocurrency at intervals of once a day, week, or two weeks.
This feature was introduced with the help of IOS developers and the Kotlin code. The service was named "Autoinvestment." Rumors that Square wanted to add this functionality to its mobile application appeared at the end of December last year when information about a vacancy related to the development of new products was published on the company's LinkedIn page.
It is assumed that in this way, Square clients will be able to reduce the risks associated with investments in cryptocurrency - they have been able to use the dollar-cost averaging (DCA) strategy when investing in Bitcoin.
7. Trello - from Java to React
Trello is one of the most popular online project management systems and is in particular demand among small companies and startups. It allows you to effectively organize work according to the Japanese methodology of kanban boards.
It was created by Fog Creek Software in 2011 with MongoDB, Backbone.js, and Node.js. Soon they implemented Kotlin and got their main advantages that have allowed Trello to become popular. These are:
- simple interface;
- almost unlimited free access;
- ease of use and the ability to integrate with other popular tools for online work.
8. Basecamp - make your project management service legendary with Kotlin
The first version of the legendary project management service Basecamp was released in 2004, the second - in 2013, and recently version 3 was released.
It finally lifted the restriction on the number of projects in all tariff plans (until now, unlimited projects were available only at the highest tariff). Among the new features, we note the automatic check-in polls of the team, for example, "what have you done today?" the rest schedule (you can set the days and hours when Basecamp will not send notifications), private chats (pings), improved Campfire group chat, separate chats with clients, "Applause" button (similar to Like) in posts, @mentions, project timelines (ala Facebook), the ability to assign a task to several employees at once, improved search, reports, document folders, a new text editor, updated mobile apps for Android and iOS.
And of course, all of that became available due to Kotlin development. For the complete convenience of working with Kotlin, the creators made it compatible with the Java library, since many programmers have switched from it to Kotlin. It can use all known Java frameworks and libraries, as well as individual modules in current projects.
9. Quizlet - probably the best Kotlin-powered ed-tech mobile app
This is another ed-tech service. Its main functions are helping students and teachers of universities and schools to practice and master their skills and ease the learning process.
This app is built with Kotlin Multiplatform.
Quizlet’s Ankush Gupta writes,
“Android, iOS, and backend engineers were eager to write and maintain code written in Kotlin rather than JavaScript. After playing around with the interactive “Kotlin by Example ‘’ section on the Kotlin website, even their front end web engineers found themselves impressed by what Kotlin multiplatform was able to deliver.”
10. Evernote - simplifying the work with Kotlin platform
Stumbled upon an interesting article? Did you see the poster of the concert you should go to? Have a great idea? You need a place where all this can be stored, and most importantly, then it is easy to find. Such a place could be a notebook, a monitor with a bunch of stickers on the screen, a program on your phone, or any note-taking service (for example, Evernote).
Thanks to Kotlin, Evernote is a really flexible tool for management. Here is why:
- You can create notes in it, add typed and handwritten text, office files, and photos to them.
- No time to write? Take a photo and then find this note by the text in this photo (yes, Evernote recognizes many languages).
- Have an idea, but it's inconvenient to write? Use Evernote like a voice recorder.
- Want a colleague to make edits? Give it access to the note.
- Do you need all communication to be in one place? Evernote has a chat.
- Need to remind yourself of something in a couple of months? No question, add a reminder.
- Want to make a presentation? Evernote has added this too. Even a laser pointer instead of a cursor.
You may have heard of Lazy Loading in web development. This feature allows loading only the initial content of the application that is needed and significantly reduces loading times. Thanks to this Kotlin feature, it is easy for Android developers to prioritize primary resources by storing them in main memory and slowly loading other resources from secondary memory. Overall, this reduces application startup time, which is a very important factor for a project's success. This feature makes Evernote the favorite app of every office worker.
Summary
To sum up, Kotlin provides programmers with everything they need to comfortably work with a new language. Android app developers have received the tool they've been waiting for: modern, intuitive, and without unnecessary bells and whistles. Do not be afraid of Kotlin's shortcomings (of course they exist). They are minimal, and the experience gained will help you cope with them.
Looking for Kotlin developers? There are dozens of Kotlin and other mobile developers in our network. Ideamotive will make sure to connect you with talents perfectly fitted for your industry and company culture.
