What are the best alternatives to Java for Android development?

Question

DevelopmentMobile DevelopmentAndroid

What are the best alternatives to Java for Android development?

12

Options
Considered

90

User
Recs.

Nov 11, 2023

Last
Updated

12 Options Considered

Best alternatives to Java for Android development	Price	Current stable version	Platforms
61 Kotlin	Free	1.3	-
-- Clojure	-	1.10.1	Windows, Linux, Mac
-- C#	Free	-	Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IOS
-- Lua	-	-	Windows, Mac, Android, Linux
-- C++	-	-	-

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score 26 · Answer 1

Kotlin

Top Pro

Amazing IDE support

Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. See More

Top Con

May be hard for programmers already used to imperative style to learn functional programming from Kotlin

Since Kotlin does not enforce any particular paradigms and is not purely functional, it can be pretty easy to fall back to imperative programming habits if a programmer comes from an imperative background. See More

MagicalThoas's Experience

Writing enterprise applications in Kotlin. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.3

Top Pro

Now officially supported by Google

Top Con

The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations

The need to make Kotlin interoperable with Java has caused some unintuitive limitations to the language design. See More

Top Pro

Easy adoption for existing Java programmers

Kotlin runs on the JVM and Java interoperability has been one of the main objectives since the language was born. It runs everywhere Java does; web servers, mobile devices (Android), and desktop applications. It also works with all the major tools in the Java ecosystem like Eclipse, IntelliJ, Maven, Ant, Gradle, Spring Boot, etc. All of this makes adoption extremely easy even for existing Java projects. On top of this there's also ensured Type safety and less boilerplate code needed. See More

Top Pro

Officially supported for Android development

Starting with version 3.0 of Android Studio, Kotlin support will be built-in. This means that it's now easier than ever to use Kotlin for existing Android projects or even start writing Android apps only with Kotlin from scratch. This also means that Kotlin and Kotlin plugins for Android Studio will be fully supported in the future and their likelihood of being abandoned is quite small since Google is fully embracing the language for their Android ecosystem (alongside Java and C++). See More

Top Pro

Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming

It's not overly OOP like Java and it does not enforce strict functional paradigms either. See More

Top Pro

Java interoperability

Since it runs on the JVM, Kotlin is 100% interoperable with Java and can use existing Java frameworks and libraries. See More

Top Pro

No runtime overhead

Because the standard library is pretty small and tight, it mostly consists of focused extensions of the Java standard library. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience

Kotlin's syntax is extremely easy to understand. The language can be picked up in a few hours just by reading the language reference. See More

Top Pro

Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases

Since it has such a good interoperability with Java, Java libraries, and Java tools. It can be adopted for an existing Java codebase at little to no cost. The codebase can be converted from Java to Kotlin little by little without ever disrupting the functionality of the application itself. See More

Top Pro

Great tooling support

Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc... See More

Top Pro

Multi platform support

Kotlin code can be compiled into JVM byte code, JavaScript and (soon) Native code. This allow simply share some code between mobile app for Android and iOS as well as server and desktop standalone apps. See More

Top Pro

Is built to solve industrial problems

Kotlin has been designed and built by developers who have an industrial background and not an academic one. As such, it tries to solve issues mostly found in industrial settings. For example, the Kotlin type system helps developers avoid null pointer exceptions. Reasearch languages usually do not have null at all, but APIs and large codebases usually need null. See More

See All

score 11 · Answer 2

Clojure

Top Pro

Simplicity as a pillar of culture.

Simplicity is one of the pillars on which Clojure is built. Clojure tries to solve many problems in software development as simply as possible. Instead of building complex interfaces, objects or factories, it uses immutability and simple data structures See More

Top Con

Confusing error messages

Clojure's error messages more often than not are very confusing. They usually involve stack traces that do not thoroughly explain where the error was caused or what caused it. See More

SpiritedAchuguayo's Experience

Really is rubbish. Community sadistically pushes terse complicated code. Esoteric language, that is unfamiliar and peculiar. Cryptic errors and craziness with nil. More of a badge to say one is using something different, but the language itself is truly without any real benefits. It's more about being in an exclusive club, and fooling those outside of it. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Current stable version:1.10.1

GZipped size:3.7Mb, requires JAVA

Site:www.clojure.org

Top Pro

Few components of syntax

Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead See More

Top Con

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations

Some language constructs were obviously created as workarounds for JVM limitations. This makes the language much less elegant than it could have been. Also, the JVM has a very cumbersome FFI. See More

Top Pro

Huge ecosystem of libraries to work with

There's a very large ecosystem of high-quality Clojure libraries which developers can use. One example is Incanter. It's a great data analytics library and a very powerful tool for dealing with matrices, datasets and csv files. See More

Top Con

Code tends to be nightmare to maintain for non-authors

Tendency to devolve into difficult to manage mess of styles. Not recommended for professional use. See More

Top Pro

Designed for concurrency

Since Clojure is designed for concurrency, it offers things like Software Transaction Memory, functional programming without side-effects and immutable data structures right out of the box. This means that the development team can focus their energies on developing features instead of concurrency details. See More

Top Con

Too cult-ish

Way too niche and in-group behavior, while trying trash other languages. Only pays for select few, who run the "game" on others. See More

Top Pro

Extremely useful tool for automation, configuration and dependency management available out of the box

Leiningen is a very useful tool for Clojure developers. It helps with automation, configuration and dependency management. It's basically a must for every Clojure project. See More

Top Con

Syntax can be alien / jarring for those used to other Lisps

Perhaps some may consider this attribute an advantage, but I do not. Clojure does not attempt to maintain significant compatibility with other Lisps. So, if you already know a Lisp or are used to the way Lisp works in general, you'll probably be confused if you take a look at Clojure. See these resources for more details on this subject: https://clojure.org/reference/lisps http://stackoverflow.com/q/6008313/2636454 http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-major-difference-between-clojure.html http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/153128/166211 See More

Top Pro

Interactive development

You can tweak a program using the REPL while it's running on the device. Other languages make you recompile and reinstall before you can test such things. See More

Top Con

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations.

Some language constructs were obviously created as workarounds for JVM limitations. This makes the language much less elegant than it could have been. Also, the JVM has a very cumbersome FFI. See More

Top Pro

Immutability is the default

Clojure programmers are highly encouraged to use immutable data in their code. Therefore, most data will be immutable by default. State change is handled by functions (for transformations) and atoms (an abstraction that encapsulates the idea of some entity having an identity). See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Clojure compiles to JVM bytecode and runs inside the JVM. This means that applications written in Clojure are cross-platform out of the box. See More

Top Pro

No C/Java syntax

Refreshing, BTW! See More

Top Pro

Great tool used in automating, configuring and managing dependencies available

Leiningen is a very useful tool for Clojure developers. It helps with automation, configuration and dependency management. It's basically a must for every Clojure project. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

Clojure has an elegant macro system which enables language additions, Domain-specific languages (DSLs), to be created much easier than most other languages (with the exception of Racket, perhaps). See More

Top Pro

Dynamic language

A superb data processing language. While rich type and specification systems are available they are optional. See More

Top Pro

Good for writing concurrent programs

Since Clojure is designed for concurrency, it offers things like Software Transaction Memory, functional programming without side-effects and immutable data structures right out of the box. This means that the development team can focus their energies on developing features instead of concurrency details. See More

Top Pro

Tries to solve problems as simply as possible

Simplicity is one of the pillars on which Clojure is built. Clojure tries to solve many problems in software development as simply as possible. Instead of building complex interfaces, objects or factories, it uses immutability and simple data structures. See More

Top Pro

Minimal syntax

Being a LISP, programs are simple: they're just functions and data. That it doesn't get bogged down with syntax or the loftier FP concepts like monads makes it one of most approachable functional languages for beginners. See More

See All

score 4 · Answer 3

C#

Top Pro

Xamarin

Since it doubles as an intermediate tool for IOs and Android then that would make it an alternative to Java/Kotlin for Android. See More

Top Con

Complex syntax

Too many syntactic constructs to learn before it becomes usable. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IOS

License:MIT, Open Source

Standard:ECMA

IDE Support:Visual Studio on Windows, JetBrains Rider, Visual Studio Code on other platforms

Top Pro

Incredibly well-engineered language

Where other languages invoke the feeling of being a product of organic growth over time, C# just feels like an incredibly well-designed language where everything has its purpose and almost nothing is non-essential. See More

Top Con

Sandboxing has performance implications

C# relies on .NET functionality to run partially-trusted code. When loading code into a separate app domain, permissions can be specified. However, it results in performance loss due to slow cross-domain calls and can be undesireable in a game. Running code in the same domain can result in a security risk. See More

Top Pro

Supported on many platforms

C# can be used for Windows apps, Linux apps, OS X apps, Windows 8 "modern" apps, websites, games, iPhone apps, Android apps, Windows Phone apps, and more. If you want to create a cross-platform application, you can share most of the code and write one GUI for each platform. See More

Top Pro

Awesome IDE for cross-platform development

Visual studio has embraced cross platform development over the past 3 years. With Visual Studio Code, you now have a light, and quick IDE variant available for free as well. See More

Top Pro

Very high demand in the industry.

C#'s been around for just the right amount of time, is regularly updated with useful additions, is versatile, easy to write & read, & has excellent tooling support. This means it is a top choice for many organisations & will remain so for the foreseeable future. See More

Top Pro

Best language for Windows programs

C# is clearly the best choice for Windows programs. The .NET framework contains everything you need to build great-looking apps, without having to learn the confusing Win32 API or download a ton of external libraries. C# can also be used to build Windows 8's "modern" apps. See More

Top Pro

Great introduction to object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is the most widely-used paradigm. C# offers support for common OOP features such as classes, methods and fields, plus some features not found in competing languages like properties, events and static classes. C# code is much more readable thanks to the syntactic sugar it offers. You can truly concentrate on your code, not on the way it's implemented. See More

Top Pro

Awesome IDE for Windows

On Windows, Visual Studio is the recommended C# IDE. It provides a very flexible GUI that you can rearrange the way you want and many useful features such as refactorings (rename a variable, extract some code into a method, ...) and code formatting (you can pick exactly how you want the code to be formatted). Visual Studio also highlights your errors when you compile, making your debug sessions more efficient since you don't have to run the code to see the mistakes. There's also a powerful debugger that allows you to execute the code step-by-step and even change what part of the code will be executed next. In addition to giving you all the line-by-line information you'll need in a hassle-free manner, Visual Studio has stuff you can click on in the errors window that will take you to the documentation for that error, saving you several minutes of web searching. In addition to all of this, Visual Studio has an intuitive, intelligent, and helpful graphical user interface designer that generates code for you (the best of WYSIWYG, in my opinion), which is helpful for new programmers. Being able to create a fantastic-looking UI with one's mouse and then optionally tweak with code helps make programming fun for beginner developers. Visual Studio also has the best code completion --Intellisense is every bit as intelligent as the name says it is. It, as well as VS's parameter hinting, is context-, type-, user-, and position-sensitive, and displays relevant completions in a perfectly convenient yet understandable order. This feature allows a new programmer to answer the questions "What does this do?" and "How do I use it?" right then and there rather than having to switch to a browser to read through extensive documentation. This allows the programmer to satisfy their curiosity before it is snuffed out by several minutes of struggling through exhaustive documentation. And for the more adventurous and text-ready developer, Microsoft does the best job of ensuring that everything, from interfaces and wildcard types down to Console.WriteLine("") and the + operator, is well-documented and easy to understand, with relevant and well-explained usage examples that manage to be bite-size yet complete, simple yet truly helpful. The reference site is easy to navigate, well-organized, clean and uncluttered, up-to-date, and fresh and enjoyable to look at, and every page is well-written with consideration for readers who are not C# experts yet want to read about changing the console background color. The best part? It's free! Visual C# Express contains all of the features described above, at zero cost. If you are a student, you can probably get Visual Studio Professional from your university, which also includes tools for unit testing and supports plugins. See More

Top Pro

Incredibly Well-Engineered Language

Where other languages invoke the feeling of being a product of organic growth over time, C# just feels like an incredibly well-designed language where everything has its purpose and almost nothing is non-essential. See More

Top Pro

.NET is a great toolbox

C# runs on top of the .NET framework, which provides many libraries containing classes used for common tasks such as connecting to the Internet, displaying a window or editing files. Unlike many other languages, you don't have to pick between a handful of libraries for every small task you want to do. See More

Top Pro

Supports some functional features

C# is primarily object-oriented, but it also supports some features typically found in functional languages such as lambdas, delegates and anonymous classes. Methods can be treated like any other object, and the Linq query system operates on monads with lazy evaluation (though it hides this with a lot of syntactic sugar). You don't need to use these features to code in C#, though, so you can start with OOP and then learn about them. See More

See All

score 10 · Answer 4

Lua

Top Pro

Corona

Corona is probably the main reason why Lua is good for Android development. See More

Top Con

Batteries not included

Lua is so small mainly due to many of the components not being included in the core package. A lot of people need the functionality provided by the Lua module management system LuaRocks and libraries such as Penlight. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Android, Linux

Top Pro

LÖVE

LÖVE is another cross platform game framework. Really easy to use, and desktop to Android is almost drag and drop like. See More

Top Con

Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables

When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find bugs. See More

Top Pro

Overall language

Due to Lua's high performance (fast and small), it is used everywhere: backend application servers (NginX), smartphones (Android and iOS), IOT (embedded electronic devices), database engines (Redis), communication (WireShark). No other language can reach this. Learn Lua and you are ready to go everywhere. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Lua's performance compares very well to other languages, If performance needs to be further improved you can: Implement critical parts in C Use the LuaJIT compiler. The LuaJIT compiler is a drop in replacement for the stock compiler and provides significant performance improvements. From the overview page: LuaJIT speeds can rival code written in C. See More

Top Pro

Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners

The Lua syntax is modeled from Modula, a language known for being a fantastic introduction to programming. The Lua syntax also has the following key characteristics: Semicolon as a statement separator is optional (mostly used to resolve ambiguous cases as in a = f; (g).x(a)). Syntactic sugar for function calls (f'string', f"string", f[[string]], and f{table}) and method calls (obj:m()). See More

Top Pro

Very easy to integrate with C and C++

One of the best features of Lua is its very well designed C API. This is very useful if you have an existing C library you need to integrate with Lua or quickly get a Lua script running on the C side of the game. Finally Lua plays so nice with C that if you need to optimise for speed you can re-write it in C a lot easier than other languages. See More

Top Pro

Helpful community

Due to the growing popularity, Lua has a rather large and helpful community surrounding it. See More

Top Pro

There are lots of quality game engines written in Lua

For example Gideros and Defold. See More

See All

score 12 · Answer 5

C++

Top Pro

Best way to understand algorithms

Top Con

Module system is not great

C++ uses the #include mechanism provided by C. Which unfortunately is a poor way of accessing the API of a library. Some of the reasons why the module system is weak are: Compile time scalability: The compiler must preprocess every header included in a file, and every header included in those headers. This process must be repeated for every translation unit in the program. As can be imagined, this doesn't scale very well. For each header added you are increasing the compilation time exponentially. Fragile: modules included are treated as textual imports by the compiler. This causes all sorts of problems since they are subject to any macro definitions in the time of the inclusion. If any of these macro definitions collide with a name in the library it can break the library API . See More

Specs

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

Engine:UE4 , Cocos-2d-x

Top Pro

Teaches low-level programming, but doesn't have as many pitfalls as C

Teaches data types, low-level program flow and the so common C-style syntax while not being as much of a pain as C itself. See More

Top Pro

Teaches problem solving

The great STL is the most powerful Data Structure and Algorithms Library. It would benefit you very much in problem solving, your main main way to love programming. The code is much compact compared to Java and C#. No unnecessary classes are in your way; yet when you need classes they are available unlike C. The code runs very fast. See More

Top Pro

Huge language supports most everything

C++ is a large language with an even larger community and following. It has libraries for every kind of task that is possible to do with C++. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 6

Kivy

Top Con

Very difficult to deploy to various platforms, like Android.

Top Pro

3D

Kivy 3D is amazing! See More

AgreeableBalor's Experience

I personally recommends kivy for beginner before they dive into android app developement! See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, Pi

License:MIT

Top Con

Documentation & examples are terrible

Terrible documentation & not too many resources can be found. See More

Top Pro

Multitouch gestures

Top Pro

Kv design language

Kv design language is designed to work well with scalable graphical user interfaces (GUIs) as one of its primary focuses. It also segregates the logic from the design elements, making them easier to visually distinguish from each other. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 7

Kawa

Top Con

Extremely low demand for developers in industry

score 2 · Answer 8

Beeware

Top Pro

Open source

Top Con

Still in alpha

Features are missing and the API is not stable. See More

Top Pro

One codebase. Multiple apps.

BeeWare allows you to write your app in Python and release it on multiple platforms. No need to rewrite the app in multiple programming languages. It means no issues with build tools, environments, compatibility, etc. See More

Top Pro

Python makes it easier for beginners to start.

See All

score 1 · Answer 9

Delphi

Top Pro

Free Community Edition

Embarcadero recently made available a Free CE version. Based on the Professional license, is also capable of Android and iOS development. This also helps to offset the CON of the high price of the fully licensed commercial product. The CE license grants the user a limited use commercial license, unlimited for non-commercial use. See More

Specs

Price:Community Edition: Free Professional: $1,495.00 Enterprise: $3,514.00 Architect: $5,623.00

Current Version:Sydney 10.4

Top Pro

Single code base to create Windows, iOS, Mac OS and Android app

Write your code once and target multiple platforms at compile time. See More

Top Pro

Runtime speed

Top Pro

Able to deliver single executable applications

Top Pro

Strongly typed

See All

score 4 · Answer 10

Xtend

Top Con

Difficult to configure in Android Studio

Top Pro

Ruby-like syntactic conveniences

Lambdas are written like Smalltalk's blocks. If it's the last argument, it can go after the parentheses like Ruby's blocks. Parentheses on method calls are optional. See More

Top Con

Slower compilation

Unlike most JVM languages, Xtend compiles to Java rather than directly to JVM bytecode. So you have to compile everything four times for Android: from Xtend to Java, from Java to JVM bytecode (.class files), from .class to .dex bytecode, and then AOT compilation from .dex to native ARM upon installation. This can really slow down development and testing vs a more interactive language like Clojure. See More

Top Pro

Type inference

It uses Java's static type system, but you don't have to declare the type of everything all the time, since the Xtend compiler can usually figure it out. This also dramatically cuts down on Java's infamous verbosity. See More

Top Pro

Code runs just as fast as Java

Because Xtend relies heavily on JDK and Android classes, it runs just as fast as native Java code. See More

Top Pro

Easy to switch back to Java

Xtend is a low-risk option. Because it compiles to human-readable Java, if you decide you don't like it for your project, you can just switch back to Java without losing your work. See More

Top Pro

Extend even library classes with new methods

This is where it gets its name. You can open classes and add new methods, kind of like Ruby. (Of course this has to be compiled to Java, so really it lives in a kind of helper class.) See More

Top Pro

Succint

Uses functional features ,which are very concise and idiomatic. Plus it has annotations, which cuts down on the Java boilerplate. See More

Top Pro

Better defaults than Java

Methods are public if you don't specify, and fields are private. Locals declared with val in Xtend are final in Java. This dramatically cuts down on Java's infamous verbosity. See More

See All

Answer 11

Ruboto

Top Pro

Freely mix Java and Ruby in a Ruboto project

Ruby is kind of slow, but you can rewrite the bottlenecks in Java for performance. See More

Top Con

App startup takes a few seconds

This is a big deal on mobile. See More

12 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Kotlin

My Recommendation for Kotlin

Amazing IDE support

May be hard for programmers already used to imperative style to learn functional programming from Kotlin

Now officially supported by Google

The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations

Easy adoption for existing Java programmers

Officially supported for Android development

Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming

Java interoperability

No runtime overhead

Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience

Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases

Great tooling support

Multi platform support

Is built to solve industrial problems

My Recommendation for Clojure

My Recommendation for Clojure

Simplicity as a pillar of culture.

Confusing error messages

Few components of syntax

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations

Huge ecosystem of libraries to work with

Code tends to be nightmare to maintain for non-authors

Designed for concurrency

Too cult-ish

Extremely useful tool for automation, configuration and dependency management available out of the box

Syntax can be alien / jarring for those used to other Lisps

Interactive development

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations.

Immutability is the default

Cross platform

No C/Java syntax

Great tool used in automating, configuring and managing dependencies available

Extensible

Dynamic language

Good for writing concurrent programs

Tries to solve problems as simply as possible

Minimal syntax

My Recommendation for C#

My Recommendation for C#

Xamarin

Complex syntax

Incredibly well-engineered language

Sandboxing has performance implications

Supported on many platforms

Awesome IDE for cross-platform development

Very high demand in the industry.

Best language for Windows programs

Great introduction to object-oriented programming

Awesome IDE for Windows

Incredibly Well-Engineered Language

.NET is a great toolbox

Supports some functional features

My Recommendation for Lua

My Recommendation for Lua

Corona

Batteries not included

LÖVE

Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables

Overall language

Fast

Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners

Very easy to integrate with C and C++

Helpful community

There are lots of quality game engines written in Lua

My Recommendation for C++

My Recommendation for C++

Best way to understand algorithms

Module system is not great

Teaches low-level programming, but doesn't have as many pitfalls as C

Teaches problem solving

Huge language supports most everything

My Recommendation for Kivy

My Recommendation for Kivy

Very difficult to deploy to various platforms, like Android.

3D

Documentation & examples are terrible

Multitouch gestures