6 Language Options for Android App Development

I am sure you might know how mobile apps have become an important part of our lives. And as a business owner, you might want to build an app for your business to increase engagements and sales. For that you need to decide three prime things:

• Which platform has the majority of your users? 
• Which features do you want in your app? 
• Which language can provide you with all the features? 

Talking about the platform, if you are choosing Android, which has 133.4 million users worldwide, then there are many language options to opt from. And as a developer, you might be seeking new and effective language options to learn or provide to your customers. For this too, Android is a great choice to start with, and it also has many languages to explore. Here we shall discuss some of the languages useful for developing Android applications to know what you can get from each language.

Languages for Android App Development

While Kotlin is an official language for Android, there are many other languages too that one can opt for Android app development like:

Java

Earlier Java was an official language for Android app development, which has now been replaced by Kotlin. Java is one of the most supported languages by Google. Additionally, Java has a great online community to support developers and businesses in terms of any problems. 

Java is, however, a complicated language for any beginner to use or develop as it contains many complex topics such as concurrency, constructors, null pointer exceptions, checked exceptions, etc.

Kotlin

As said before, Kotlin is an official language for Android app development. This is a cross-platform programming language that can be useful as an alternative to Java for developing Android apps. In 2017, it was even introduced as a secondary ‘official’ Java language. So, Kotlin can interoperate with Java language, and it can also run on the Java Virtual Machine.

The difference is that Kotlin is much simpler for beginners as compared to Java. Developers can use this language as an “entry point” for learning Android app development. And as a business owner, you can hire dedicated Kotlin developer to build your Android app that gives a user-friendly interface to the users.

C++

C++ is useful for developing Android apps using the Android Native Development Kit (NDK). It is also important to know that one cannot create an app by using only C++. One needs to use the NDK to implement parts of the app in C++ native code. This will help in implementing C++ code libraries for the app as required.

C#

C# is similar to the Java language. Like Java, C# also applies garbage collection to lessen the chances of memory leaks. Additionally, C# also has a simpler and cleaner syntax than Java which makes coding with C# easier.

Initially, the biggest limitation of the C# language was that it could only run on Windows systems because it used only the .NET Framework. Later, Xamarin handled this problem. Android tools can be useful for writing the native Android apps and sharing the code to multiple platforms.

Dart

This is an open-source programming language powering the Flutter framework. And this is getting a lot of popularity because of its ability to deliver efficient performance to apps. It supports both desktop and mobile. This language is designed by Google for client optimization. Dart eases UI development by providing features like hot reload, fast performance, etc.

Python

One can use Python for developing Android apps even though Android does not support native Python development. How can developers do this? By using various tools that can convert the Python apps in the Android packages to run on Android devices.

Conclusion

I hope that this article helped you to make a decision on which language you should choose for developing your Android app. Most of the developers and businesses choose Kotlin for Android development because of its constant updates in features and support. To develop your app in Kotlin, you can hire a dedicated Kotlin developer. Likewise, for developing Java, you can hire dedicated Java developers, and so on. For this, you can just search Kotlin developers for hire online, and you will get companies offering their best-experienced developers for you.

Hiring dedicated developers will be helpful to get suggestions and development as per your business requirement and goals. Make sure the language you choose can provide you with all the features you want in your application and ensure that it supports the platforms you have your targeted audience on.