How Kotlin won the language war in Android app development

For a project that is less than a decade old, with the first stable version being released just four years ago, the growth of the programming language Kotlin has been exponential. Google helped in this, by announcing its support for use of Kotlin on Android in 2017, and by anointing it as the preferred programming language for Android in 2019.
A July update on the Android Developers Blog says that 70% of the top 1,000 apps in the Play Store use Kotlin. Pinterest, Uber, Evernote, Square, Postmates are among those who have moved to Kotlin.
“Kotlin has become quite popular, especially since it’s been made the language of choice for Android development,” says Hadi Hariri, Kotlin developer advocate at JetBrains. JetBrains is Kotlin’s parent and it is trying to fit Kotlin into the existing multiverse of technologies – data science, web frontend, server-side, native, multiplatform and Android. Hariri describes Kotlin as a “multipurpose industrial language.”