Swift Now Can Be Used To Develop Android Applications, Open The New Era Of Cross-Platform Development

Apple's Swift programming language can now be officially used to create Android applications. (photo: x @innovaTopia_JP)

JAKARTA - Apple's Swift programming language can now be officially used to create Android applications. This news comes after Android Workgroup announced the launch of Swift SDK for Android, which allows developers to write and share the same code between iOS and Android applications.

Swift was first introduced by Apple in 2014, although its development was quietly started in 2010. This language was designed to replace Objective-C in the development of the iPhone app, and became popular because of its mild, fast, and efficient nature in optimizing data. A year after its release, Apple made it an open source, opening up opportunities for the global community to adapt Swift on various platforms.

Now, a big step comes from the Android Workgroup of an independent group formed in June 2025 by launching an official Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android. "This milestone is the result of months of hard work, continuing community efforts over the years," the group wrote in a statement.

With this new SDK, developers can write the Android app entirely in Swift without any additional tricks or tools like before. This means that they can now develop cross-platform applications more efficiently, using the same code for iOS or Android.

Swift has grown rapidly in the past decade. Apart from iPhone and Mac applications, this language is now used in browsers, Windows apps, and cloud services. The main advantage lies in interoperability of the ability to work across operating systems without many code modifications.

Android Workgroup also confirmed that the release of this SDK preview is now updated every night, showing a high commitment to developing the Swift ecosystem outside the Apple ecosystem. The SDK can now be downloaded for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

This step opens up new opportunities for developers to accelerate the innovation of cross-platform applications. Imagine, one of Swift's same code bases can now give birth to two versions of the app 'one for the iPhone, another for Android' without having to rewrite from scratch.

That way, the world of mobile programming seems to be getting closer to the developers' old dreams: once writing a code, it can run anywhere