The Android workgroup has announced nightly preview releases of the Swift SDK for Android. The Android workgroup is open group, free for anyone to join, that aims to expand Swift to Android.

Swift is Apple's language that was originally developed as an alternative language to Objective C. Swift's designers aim is to provide a single language including the best ideas from languages such as C# and JavaScript, while being easy to use.

The Swift SDK for Android can be used to port Swift packages to Android. Over 25% of packages in the Swift Package Index already build for Android, and the Community Showcase now indicates Android compatibility.

The Swift SDK for Android is made up of the Swift compiler along with an implementation of the Swift standard library running on Android. These are bundled with bindings to provide access from Swift to the Android APIs. The SDK includes the set of libraries, headers, and other resources needed to generate and run Swift code for the Android target. Cross-compiling Swift code for Android also requires the Android NDK. The "Native Development Kit" for Android includes the cross-compilation tools like clang and ld that are used by the host toolchain to cross-compile and link.

There's also the swift-java project which lets you 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.

Developers can choose their preferred UI, as the Swift SDK for Android will support a choice including Android native toolkits such as Jetpack Compose, Flutter's UI engine, and other options such as Skip. This implements SwiftUI for Android by bridging it to Jetpack Compose.

Swift SDK for Android is available in preview now.

More Information

Swift Org

Swift Android Examples On GitHub

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