Announcing the Swift SDK for Android
Swift has matured significantly over the past decade — extending from cloud services to Windows applications, browser apps, and microcontrollers. Swift powers apps and services of all kinds, and thanks to its great interoperability, you can share code across platforms.
TheAndroid workgroup is an open group, free for anyone to join, that aims to expand Swift to Android. Today, we are pleased to announce nightly preview releases of theSwift SDK for Android.
This milestone reflects months of effort by the Android workgroup, building on many years of grassroots community effort. With the SDK, developers can begin developing Android applications in Swift, opening new avenues for cross-platform development and accelerating innovation across the mobile ecosystem.
The Swift SDK for Android is available today, bundled with theWindows installer or downloadable separately for use on Linux or macOS.
Getting Started
We’ve published aGetting Started guide to help you set up your first native Swift code on an Android device. TheSwift for Android Examples help demonstrate end‑to‑end application workflows on Android.
With the Swift SDK for Android, you can now start porting your Swift packages to Android.Over 25% of packages in the Swift Package Index already build for Android, andthe Community Showcase now indicates Android compatibility.
Theswift-java project enables you to interoperate between Java and Swift. It is both a library and a code generator, enabling you to integrate Swift and Java in both directions by automatically generating safe and performant bindings. To learn about generating bindings to bring your business logic to Android, check out therecent Swift Server Side meetup talk by Mads Odgaard.
Next Steps
This preview release opens many new opportunities to continue improving these tools. We encourage you to share your experiences, ideas, tools and apps on theSwift forums. This post has been published on anassociated thread for discussion, and new posts can be shared in theAndroid category.
The Android workgroup is draftinga vision document, currently under review, for directing future work regarding Swift on Android. This vision will outline priority areas and guide community efforts to maximize impact across the ecosystem. In addition, we maintain aproject board that tracks the status of major efforts, as well asofficial CI for the Swift SDK for Android.
If you’re as excited as we are, join us and help make this ecosystem even better!