The Android team has produced two new style guides for using Kotlin on Android and provided some updates on how Kotlin uptake is going. 

On the first day of the sell out KotlinConf in San Francisco, the Android team provided some updates. The important piece of information is that 17% of projects in Android Studio 3 are using Kotlin. It isn't clear how many of these are 100% Kotlin. 

To encourage you to try the language, they have even made a video about how using Kotlin increases developer happiness, and we all know how important that is don't we... Oh yes it also helps with productivity too: 

The thing is that once you have tried Kotlin for a few hours you really don't need a video to convince you that it is a better way.

Just try it.

After you have tried it there will be some untidy questions to sort out. For example, you may know what is good style in Java, but what about Kotlin? To bridge that gap, the Android team has put together a style guide and a Java interop guide 

https://android.github.io/kotlin-guides/

Both are worth a look, although I don't like the use of "WRONG" in the style guide. For me style is a matter of taste, always, and while it might not be good, "WRONG" is too strong at term. 

Even though Kotlin is supported in a stable IDE, i.e. Android Studio 3, there is still a way to got. Some of the Android samples are being converted to Kotlin, but the IDE could still do with improvements to support the language - code completion and refactorings. It is also still a slight problem that the libraries are all in Java - you can't rid yourself of the language completely. It will take time to add Kotlin support to all that code. Currently nullability annotations are being added to Support Library 27 so that Kotlins null-safety can be extended to platform types. 

It is nice to see Android Studio, the compilers and tools all back on track after the fairly large detour caused by the Jack and Jill project. 

• Mike James is the author of The Programmer's Guide To Kotlin (I/O Press)

More Information

Update on Kotlin for Android

https://www.kotlinconf.com/

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Google's Jack & Jill Android Java Compiler Project Is Dead

The New Android Compilers - Meet Jack And Jill 

Android Studio 2.3 - In Need Of Direction

Android Studio 2.2 Preview Big Changes! 

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