The Evolution of Android Development

A look back at the last 5+ years of Android development and how far it’s come

I created my first ever Android application in 2015. Back then, Android development was entirely different compared to what it is now. There were no Jetpack libraries to learn about best practices when you were dealing with high-performance apps and large datasets and no fancy UI kits like ConstraintLayout or MotionLayout. To be frank, even Android Studio isn’t that smart back then.

In my experience since the beginning of Android development, I’ve seen tremendous progress in six areas — Language, UI, Libraries, AndroidX, Privacy & Security, and Tools.

In the beginning, I prefer to work with Java than Kotlin due to a lack of resources to learn. It wasn’t that difficult for me because I started learning Java in my college days. So it took three to four months of hard work to start my carrier as an Android developer.

Java is good, but Kotlin is Better; it took me two years to realize how Java is complicating Android development. There are no extension functions, Elvis operator, DSL capabilities, or coroutines without Kotlin and more.

The list is endless; when I finally got the courage to abandon the language I’ve been using for more than two years, I was surprised at how Kotlin improved the quality of Android development. Then Google announced Kotlin as one of the official languages for Android development in 2017.

Over the years, the Kotlin team improved the usage of the language beyond the imagination. Today we can entirely build mobile(Android & IOS — Kotlin multiplatform) & web applications(KotlinJs) with backend support(Kotlin for backend) in Kotlin.

In my experience, I’ve used both Java and Kotlin for Android development. Both languages are good, but if we compare, Kotlin is the winner without any doubt. It improves the quality of the code & productivity of the developers. I’ve document My Journey From Java to Kotlin in the following article.

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