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Announcing the Android Workgroup

You can use Swift on Android today with Skip Tools. https://skip.tools/ The Skip devs are founding members of the Swift on Android working group.

When using Skip Fuse, your Swift code compiles to 100% native Android ARM code.

They've also reimplemented ~60% of SwiftUI on Android, in an open-source library, SkipUI. https://github.com/skiptools/skip-ui SkipUI works way better than you'd think, and anyway, it's totally optional.

You can just write Swift against native Android APIs and it works fine.

20 hours agodfabulich

If Apple was really serious about combating the use of Electron and other cross-platform frameworks they would seriously support (and possibly even fund) a tool like this.

Despite the issues, if Swift and SwiftUI were available and compelling for Android then it may help to give Apple greater mindshare of developers.

15 hours agobentocorp

If Apple cared, they would’ve just included “no cross-platform apps” in their Appstore ToS and they’d be dead the next day.

That’s how Apple fights problems these days - gatekeeping and regulation.

They don’t care though, cross platform apps bring money the same way as any app

10 hours agoakmarinov

Did they finish porting the core lib to Windows?

a day agozerr

Foundation (the Swift Standard Library), Dispatch (the concurrency library), and XCTest (the testing framework) are all available and functional on Windows.

a day agoCharlesW

I remember some crucial parts were not implemented a few months ago.

19 hours agozerr

Does this help LiveView Native efforts?

(naive question)

a day ago4b11b4

I always found non-native apps too out-of-place. Please use Swift on iOS and Kotlin on Android.

a day agobestouff

Swift is just a programming language, I thought?

a day agomattl

Yes.

Unless I am also mistaken, they are seeking to make a supported language to android development.

Which will save mobile devs having to learn two languages, and also allow reuse of code.

21 hours agov5v3

Kotlin multiplatform has been around for some time if you want that. But I guess it makes sense to be able to approach it from the other end as well if you're mainly an iOS shop.

21 hours agomhast

It's the only approach that can be taken, as Android being open source can make Swift a first class supported language. Apple will be apple.

19 hours agov5v3

Yeah Swift isn’t SwiftUI.