Are android apps java based

Why starting a new Android project with Java is a bad idea

I’m a programming language sceptic. i.e. I don’t jump on every new language and try to learn five new ones every year. When I find a good one I’ll stick with it. I used Java exclusively as my programming language for 20 year. I did not jump on Kotlin when the cool people did before last year. I explain my reasoning of resisting in this earlier post.

Why and how I switched to Kotlin

I’m one of the very few (judging from my twitter stream) who weren’t jumping up and down out of excitement when Google…

In Snapp Mobile, we’ve now switched to Kotlin in all of our new project and we’re not looking back. I think we have done the right decision. Kotlin on Android is the future while Java is the past. Let me explain why.

Android developer mindshare is going to Kotlin

If you follow the Android developer community in any way you can feel the excitement of the new language. It’s not just nerds wanting something new. No. It’s hundreds of people talking, writing and commenting about possibilities and ways to improve the way we work every day.

The percentage of Android developers working in Java is dropping rapidly. A project started today will live on at least couple of years but probably beyond that. I predict that in a year or two it is going to be nearly impossible to find developers willing to work in Java or at least being motivated to do so. Going with Java is going to create a legacy system from the day one. Maintaining and improving the codebase will become more and more difficult when time passes. Sooner or later you would be converting the codebase to Kotlin so why not just start with Kotlin from the get-go.

We saw this very same process happening on iOS just few years ago. Now that Swift is commonplace it’s nearly impossible to find anyone willing to maintain ObjC codebase. Projects have to be migrated and that can be costly.

Take a look what GDEs (Google Developer Experts) think about Kotlin on Android. TL;DR: majority of GDEs have already completely shifted to Kotlin in their daily work. Most of them think Kotlin is production ready. Concerns like Mark Allison’s ones are getting resolved very rapidly.

What do 17 Google Developers Experts for Android think about Kotlin?

Google has already expressed several times that they don’t have anything against Kotlin, and that they’re not…

Kotlin is not a FAD

Google is not shy to introduce something just to let it die later. Kotlin on Android is not one of these projects. There’s heavy weight behind Kotlin from Google. Google was very visible in the first-ever KotlinConf so much so that most of the questions in the open FAQ session were about Kotlin’s future on Android. We also saw the Google Android tools team present in the event.

We’re seeing a shift in Google’s hiring policies. Many new Googlers are heavy Kotlin users and advocates.

Another good example of Google’s dedication is the recently released KTX for Android. KTX for Android is a set of Kotlin extensions specifically for Android devs making our life easier.

Exploring KTX for Android

Yesterday Google announced android-ktx, which is a set of Kotlin extensions for Android app development. It looks like…

Code quality improves

While we’re still establishing best practices and patterns on some parts of Kotlin development the language is forcing some very good habits on developers. Null-safety alone improves stability of your projects in most cases.

Also, less code, less bugs:

Less code

Less code is never a redeeming feature of a language alone. Readability is always more important than length, or lack thereof, of the code. Always! However, with Kotlin you get both. The language developers keep referring to Kotlin as a concise language. They’re not wrong.

Of course, it is possible to write bad code in every language. It will take time for all the best practices to evolve in Android Kotlin circles but they will. We already Kotlin Android Style Guide published by Google which is a great starting point.

Style guide

Official guides for developing Kotlin on Android.

Less code, when done right, leads into less bugs. When you let framework take care of certain mundane aspects of coding like boilerplate you can concentrate on building what matters. Less code also makes reading code faster. It is much easier to see where behaviour of a Kotlin data class differs from default than Java Bean class with all of its accessor methods.

Risk is minimal, Java interop

Kotlin does not lock a project to Kotlin permanently. It is possible to integrate new features built in Java to your codebase in later stages due to the complete Java interop of Kotlin programming language.

Kotlin isn’t a new thing, it’s ready

When Swift was first introduced by Apple it took some time for developers to jump on it. Getting on a completely new programming language is risky. APIs change, tools lack features etc. However, today, no new iOS project will be started with ObjC.

Kotlin is not a new language. In fact, Kotlin was introduced before Swift announced by Apple. It is more mature, tested and stable than Swift at this point. It has been possible to build Kotlin apps on Android for years before the official support was introduced last year.

Kotlin and Swift have a lot in common

Good ideas tend to be repeated, copied and imitated. It’s not surprising that the designers of Kotlin and Swift ended up with similar solutions to similar issues.

The benefit of Swift and Kotlin being so similar is that it’s now easy for the iOS team to read Android code and the other way around. Sending over program logic is trivial. You can exchange code between the teams without having to explain details every time.

Tool support is already there

JetBrains have been building Kotlin tools for years. Google’s Android Studio is based on the JetBrain’s IntelliJ Idea. After the IO announcement Google and JetBrains are now working together with Android Studio Kotlin tooling. This tooling is based on the long running work JetBrains have been doing in the past years. Unlike when Swift was first introduced on iOS, with Kotlin we’re hitting the ground running. We already have sophisticated refactoring tools, static analysis tools, formatting etc. We can even copy-paste a piece of Java code from Stackoverflow to our project and Android Studio will automagically translate it into Kotlin.. with very high success rate, I may add.

Kotlin is evolving rapidly

JetBrains is very active on pushing new features to the already comprehensive language. New features like Coroutines are enabling new ways to improve your codebase very constantly.

“But I / our developers don’t know Kotlin”

I think this is the argument that deserves the most attention in the decision process as an argument for going with Java. There’s no contest between the amount of experienced Java developers vs. experienced Kotlin developers. Java is, after all, the most popular programming language on the planet.

However. For a Java developer Kotlin is extremely easy to learn. Any Android developer can pickup the language in two weeks and be ready for productive project work. You will only need one experienced Kotlin developer in your team and the rest will fall in place easily. Use your more experienced developer to review all pull requests in the early stage. There’s no better way to learn than having someone looking at your code and proposing improvements!

Learning new comes naturally to mobile developers. We live in a constantly changing environment all the time anyways. Investing your own time to learn Kotlin is an investment to the future. And there’s plenty of good material out there!

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🛠 Почему Java используется для разработки мобильных приложений?

Использование языка Java для разработки мобильных приложений обусловлено универсальностью языка и удобством проектирования.

Причины популярности Java

Поддержка концепции ООП

Java поставляется с библиотекой шаблонов проектирования с открытым исходным кодом, а также позволяет использовать передовые практики, адаптируемые для разработки серверных, настольных, встраиваемых и мобильных приложений.

Кроссплатформенность

Другие языки программирования в той или иной степени привязаны к функциям программно-аппаратных платформ, но слоган Java гласит: «Напиши один раз, запускай где угодно». Кроссплатформенность способствует распространению языка.

С 1990 года Java используется как платформа для разработки мобильных приложений и до сих пор остаётся одним из наиболее востребованных языков программирования в этой сфере.

Поддержка сообщества

Сообщество Java помогает программистам в решении проблем. Например, форумы для отправки вопросов StackOverFlows и других пользовательских групп предоставляют расширенную поддержку по различным темам.

Популярность Java для мобильной разработки

Благодаря мобильным приложениям организации теперь связаны с клиентами напрямую через интернет и доступны круглосуточно и без выходных. Количество пользователей Android растёт, поэтому разрабатывать программы для самой популярной мобильной платформы очень выгодно для продвижения продуктов и услуг.

Надёжный набор инструментов не только помогает в кодировании, но и позволяет влиять на отладку, которая необходима для исключения ошибок во время процесса разработки. Интегрированная среда сделала разработку на Java намного удобнее и быстрее. При использовании IDE легко искать и читать код, а также выполнять его рефакторинг.

Лучшие мобильные приложения на Java

Заключение

Java считается фундаментальным языком разработки приложений для Android. Он также позволяет разработчикам писать код, который без проблем работает на нескольких мобильных платформах. В реальном мире существуют приложения Java в различных областях, таких как игры, обмен мгновенными сообщениями, потоковая передача музыки и торговля.

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Why do we use java for creating Android application?

Android is not only OS its a stack mechine, We use java as a programming language for creating android application..

Android runs on many different hardware platforms. You would need to compile and optimize your native code for each of these different platforms to see any real benefits.

There are a large number of developers already proficient in Java.

Java has huge open source support, with many libraries and tools available to make developers life easier.

Java protects you from many of the problems inherent in native code, like memory leaks, bad pointer usage, etc.

Java allows them to create sandbox applications, and create a better security model so that one bad App can’t take down your entire OS.

Android apps can be developed using java,C,C++,C#(XAMARIN),html(PhoneGap) ,python etc.Then why JAVA when Android OS has a linux kernel which is developed using c and C++?JAVA is the most popular language in computer science, we have a lot of developer using java more than any other computer language.That is what Android team just wanted for the initial push of the OS.More developer means more apps, more apps means more publicity, so the best option was JAVA and they preferred it.

Initially android was built using java architecture.
So the libraries it supported were mainly for java programming.
Android native development kit supports development in C and C++.
At present it also supports other scripting languages like python.

Nowadays, using Java as a programming language for Android development has become a choice rather than the only option.
New technologies appear everyday that let you create Android apps in the language of your choice.
— If you like web development you can try any of the frameworks out there that let you create your apps in Javascript + HTML + CSS, such as ‘Titanium SDK’, to name one.
These tools basically wrap all the web code (web pages) you write into a native APK file (Android application package) that will execute your code inside an embedded web browser, and leave them ready for you to upload to the Google Play market.
These tools give you as much flexibility as you want as they even wrap the phone’s hardware capabilities (camera, GPS, etc.) in JS interfaces.
The only disadvantage is that all the code will run on a web browser and therefore will be slower than native code.
— If you’re a C++ lover, thanks to the NDK you can write your whole application in that language.
It is however noted in the NDK documentation that just by programming in C++ will not boost the application performance.
You have to do a case-by-case study and consider the pros and cons of this approach.
— And finally my favorite.
If you like the .NET framework and the C# language you can give a try to Xamarin.
It is a framework created by the same people that made the Mono project (.NET for Linux) and that let’s you create mobile applications for Android AND iOS in C# with the benefit of reusing a huge amount of code (what’s known as cross-platform development) .
You will only have to focus on platform’s specifics when dealing with the UI and maybe some of the hardware.
This platform is growing by the day and to me is the best approach at the moment when you want to start a serious mobile development project.
Finally, why is Java the preferred language for Android in the first place? Android is a linux-based system.
Java is an easily embeddable VM that is used massively in any kind of machine.
I guess that was one of the reasons to choose it over other technologies.
At the moment, though, there have been tests with other technologies such as a custom Mono framework VM for phones that have yielded better performance results than the current Java implementation.
Hope this helps!

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Why does Android use Java? [closed]

OK, this should really be asked to someone from Google, but I just want other opinions.

Even though Android supports Native code applications, the main development tool is still Java. But why? I mean, isn’t it too slow to interpret code on a mobile device? When introducing Froyo, Google said that new JIT compiler can achieve 2-5 times faster applications. This means, that using Java over native code is 2-x times slower.

Yes, I know that using managed code applications is safer in terms of system stability, since virtual machines have better control over program execution, but still, this performance drop is huge, and I don’t see any point why to use it.

9 Answers 9

Java is a known language, developers know it and don’t have to learn it

it’s harder to shoot yourself with Java than with C/C++ code since it has no pointer arithmetic

it runs in a VM, so no need to recompile it for every phone out there and easy to secure

large number of development tools for Java (see point 1)

several mobile phones already used Java ME, so Java was known in the industry

the speed difference is not an issue for most applications; if it was you should code in low-level language

On the byte-code level, Android doesn’t use Java. The source is Java, but it doesn’t use a JVM.

The improvement to system stability is very important on a device like a cell phone.

Security is even more important. The Android environment lets users run semi-trusted apps which could exploit the phone in truly unpleasant ways without excellent security. By running all apps in a virtual machine, you guarantee that no app can exploit the OS kernel unless there is a flaw in the VM implementation. The VM implementation, in turn, is presumably small and has a small, well-defined security surface.

Perhaps most important, when programs are compiled to code for a virtual machine, they do not have to be recompiled for new hardware. The market for phone chips is diverse and rapidly-changing, so that’s a big deal.

Also, using Java makes it less likely that the apps people write will be exploitable themselves. No buffer-overruns, mistakes with pointers, etc.

Native code is not necessarily any faster than Java code. Where is your profile data showing that native code could run faster?

Android runs on many different hardware platforms. You would need to compile and optimize your native code for each of these different platforms to see any real benefits.

There are a large number of developers already proficient in Java.

Java has huge open source support, with many libraries and tools available to make developers life easier.

Java protects you from many of the problems inherent in native code, like memory leaks, bad pointer usage, etc.

Java allows them to create sandbox applications, and create a better security model so that one bad App can’t take down your entire OS.

First of all, according to Google, Android doesn’t use Java. That’s why Oracle is suing Google. Oracle claims that Android infringes on some Java technology, but Google says it’s Dalvik.

Secondly, I haven’t seen a Java byte code interpreter since 1995.

Can you back up your performance conjecture with some actual benchmarks? The scope of your presumptions don’t seem justified given the inaccurate background information you provide.

Java has a pretty compelling argument for Google using it in Android: it has a huge base of developers. All these developers are (kind of) ready to develop for their mobile platform.

Keep in mind that, technically speaking, Android does not use pure Java.

As touched on elsewhere, the main issue is that Android is designed as a portable OS, to run on a wide variety of hardware. It’s also building on a framework and language familiar to many existing mobile developers.

Finally, I would say it is a bet against the future — whatever performance issues exist will become irrelevant as hardware improves — equally by getting developers to code against an abstraction, Google can rip-out and change the underlying OS far more easily, than if developers were coding to the POSIX/Unix APIs.

For most applications the overhead of using a VM-based language over native is not significant (the bottleneck for apps consuming web services, like Twitter, is mostly networking). The Palm WebOS also demonstrates this — and that uses JavaScript rather than Java as the main language.

Given that almost all VMs JIT compile down to native code, raw code speed is often comparable with native speed. A lot of delays attributed to higher-level languages are less to do with the VM overhead than other factors (a complex object runtime, ‘safety’ checking memory access by doing bounds checking, etc).

Also remember that regardless of the language used to write an application, a lot of the actual work is done in lower level APIs. The top level language is often just chaining API calls together.

There are, of course, many exceptions to this rule — games, audio and graphics apps that push the limits of phone hardware. Even on the iOS, developers often drop down to C/C++ to get speed in these areas.

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