With the latest ART 13 update, runtime and compiler optimizations resulted in app startup time “improvements of up to 30% on some devices.” Behind the scenes, “ART is the same for all ...

It’s no surprise that Google’s hope is that over time, all Android developers will switch over to Kotlin. “There is still quite a bit of Java still happening on Android,” Ward said.

Kotlin is a super new programming language built by JetBrains, which also coincidentally develops the JetBrains IDE that Android Studio — Google’s official developer tool — is based on.

It was only two years ago, at I/O 2017, that Google announced support for Kotlin in its Android Studio IDE.That came as a bit of a surprise, given that Java had long been the preferred language ...