What are the best alternatives to Java for Android development?

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score 20 · Answer 1

Kotlin

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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

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

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

Now officially supported by Google

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

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

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

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

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

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Current stable version:1.2

Site:http://kotlinlang.org

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score 4 · 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

Top Pro

Few components of syntax

Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead 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 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 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 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

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Current stable version:1.9

Site:www.clojure.org

GZipped size:3.7Mb, requires JAVA

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score 6 · Answer 3

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

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

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score 8 · Answer 4

C++

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

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

Price:Depends on Implementation

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

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score 1 · Answer 5

Beeware

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 Con

Still in alpha

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

Top Pro

Python makes it easier for beginners to start.

Top Pro

Open source

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score 2 · Answer 6

C#

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

Complex syntax

Too many syntactic constructs to learn before it becomes usable. 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

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

Specs

Price:Free

Current stable version:7

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score 1 · Answer 7

Kawa

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score 1 · Answer 8

Delphi

Top Pro

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

Top Pro

Runtime speed

Top Pro

Able to deliver single executable applications

Top Pro

Strongly typed

Specs

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

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Answer 9

Kivy

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

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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

11 Options Considered

Amazing IDE support

The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations

Java interoperability

No runtime overhead

Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience

Now officially supported by Google

Great tooling support

Easy adoption for existing Java programmers

Officially supported for Android development

Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases

Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming

Multi platform support

Simplicity as a pillar of culture.

Confusing error messages

Few components of syntax

Huge ecosystem of libraries to work with

Designed for concurrency

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

Interactive development

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

Huge language supports most everything

Module system is not great

One codebase. Multiple apps.

Still in alpha

Python makes it easier for beginners to start.

Open source

Incredibly well-engineered language

Complex syntax

Supports some functional features

Sandboxing has performance implications

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

Runtime speed

Able to deliver single executable applications

Strongly typed

Difficult to configure in Android Studio

Ruby-like syntactic conveniences

Slower compilation

Type inference

Code runs just as fast as Java

Easy to switch back to Java

Extend even library classes with new methods

Succint

Better defaults than Java

Freely mix Java and Ruby in a Ruboto project

App startup takes a few seconds

Don't see your favorite option? Add it.

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