Building Android Apps with Swift | Fatbobman’s Swift Weekly #071

Building Android Apps with Swift

Recently, the Swift community established the Swift on Android Community Workgroup, aiming to promote the use of Swift in the Android ecosystem. This initiative follows a similar path to how the Arc browser advanced Swift’s development on the Windows platform. Notably, members of the Skip team, which specializes in cross-platform development, have also joined the working group. Although still in its early stages, this undoubtedly marks an important step for the Swift community in breaking down platform barriers.

For developers deeply entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, the possibility of using the familiar Swift language to develop Android applications is an exciting prospect. However, the path to cross-platform development is far from smooth. Much of Swift’s infrastructure, from official frameworks to numerous third-party libraries, is tightly intertwined with Apple’s platforms. To achieve true cross-platform development, the community needs to build a comprehensive set of platform-agnostic APIs, which remains a significant challenge for most developers.

Fortunately, the open-source community is contributing to Swift’s cross-platform journey. The OpenSwiftUI project recently released the implementation of ViewList, a critical…