Bringing Swift and SwiftUI to Android
Swift and SwiftUI are Apple’s recommended technologies for app development, and with good reason. Their emphasis on safety, efficiency, and expressiveness have made it easier than ever to build fast, polished, and robust apps for the Apple ecosystem.
Recent stories about Swift on Windows, Swift on the Playdate, and a SwiftUI-like library for Gnome highlight developers’ desire to take advantage of Swift and SwiftUI in other environments too, and advances in Swift tooling have facilitated the porting process. We’re excited to share how Skip combines several Swift platform technologies to bring Swift and SwiftUI development to Android.
There are multiple paths to supporting Swift on Android, and - like everything in engineering - each comes with its own set of tradeoffs. We chose transpilation as our primary mechanism. Transpiling your Swift source to Android’s native Kotlin language maximizes interoperability - a key concern when you want to take advantage of Android-specific features and APIs in your apps.
Our Swift-to-Kotlin transpiler is powered by SwiftSyntax, and we use use Swift Package Manager to both invoke the transpiler as part of the build process, and to integrate our suite of open source Android libraries.
