X Reasons to build your startup with Kotlin in 2020

Here you are, CEO of the newly created company, who just got his seed round. It looks like you have a great idea (and now it’s validated by VCs), which can bring a real impact on daily people’s lives. What to do next?

Well … now you need to create a first working version of your product, which can be delivered to early adopters. You must be moving blazingly fast and burning as little cash as possible. Of course, you need to hire software engineers or an agency …

But first of all, you need to choose a technology on which your product will be built. This is a very important choice, which will affect your whole company’s journey in the long run (much of Facebook is still written in PHP 🤦‍♂️). In this article, I’ll advocate for one of my most favorite languages — Kotlin and its wide framework.

1. Cross-platform hero

There is a lot of buzz about cross-platform technologies nowadays. Honestly, in most of the cases, it’s rather marketing than reality (you can’t call a site rendered in WebView on Android / iOS the “cross-platform”).

From all the technologies I’ve tried for developing cross-platform apps, Koltin is the closest to the real meaning of the term. This is achieved by a combination of a few factors:

• support of compilation into Java bytecode, which is supported by JVM
• support of compilation into native code (Kotlin/Native)
• two-way interoperability with a native code

This allows Kotlin to be the first-class citizen everywhere: Android / iOS (Kotlin Multiplatform), Backend / Frontend (Ktor framework), Desktop (Kotlin/Native) and many others. So having Kotlin developer in the team allows you to develop applications for almost all widely-used platforms, which means noticeable cost & time savings for your startup.

The most vital use-case of Kotlin as a cross-platform tool is “Kotlin for Mobile”, which allows you to share the business-logic between both platforms while keeping the native UI/UX at almost no extra-costs. Such companies as DripStat, Course, Pinterest, Netflix, Uber, and many others have already deeply integrated this use-case into their products.

2. Exponential growth

Even though Kotlin is a relatively young language. It’s being widely adopted by many large companies and independent developers across all the world at an exponential rate. Actually, Kotlin is currently the fastest growing language in the GitHub ecosystem, growing at a rate of 2.6x year-over-year (source).

Since the moment when Google introduced Kotlin as an official (and recommended) language for Android app development along with Java and C++ at its annual Google I/O in 2017, Kotlin has got a huge amount of supporters in the Android community. Currently 4 out of 10 top apps in Google Play are using Kotlin (source).

This unprecedented growth and adoption of Kotlin means that more and more developers are joining the ecosystem. For you as a founder, this is a very good sign, because finding new employees will be easier and easier every coming day.

3. Free and open-source

Having access to the source code of the tool you are using is a great advantage for many reasons. At least, you or your developers can always debug the issue, which is happening in your specific case, unique to your business or product. Or you can even modify the open-source tool to better fit your needs and contribute to the universal good.

Kotlin is absolutely free and open-source, with official repo hosted on GitHub. At this moment it has 60K+ commits and 350+ contributors and this is just for a single language repo. JetBrains has another 442 repositories open-sourced on GitHub. Just imagine this scale!

4. Time- and cost-efficient

Build on the top of Java ecosystem, which means it’s fully compatible with all Java libraries and frameworks, Kotlin has already got first-class support and thousands of dedicated libraries from many software development companies and individual developers.

With Kotlin you have a free, efficient and solid solution for almost any problem you face:

• Need a server or client networking solution? Take Ktor.
• Need to work with JSON? Take kotlinx.serialization, GSON, Jackson, etc.
• Need to handle images? Here is Glide, UIL, Picasso and many others.
• Need some wizardry? Well, take a look on Epoxy or Lottie 😄

Your team will be able to deliver anything you need in the very short term and high-quality.

5. Amazing community

Open-source creates a community around any product because many people are facing similar problems and some of them are ready to spend their time solving those problems. These core communities create even more communities, offline and online, global and local.

There are 30K+ of questions about Kotlin on StackOverflow, dedicated Kotlin groups in almost all large cities, thousands of contributors to official JetBrains repositories. Kotlin would never be that great without all these people around the world.

So whenever you are facing aproblem with Kotlin, you can be sure that you just need to ask for help and you will be helped. I’m very proud to be part of this great international community.

6. Top-notch tool for developers

Developers are those who transform ideas and mockups into working applications. Never ever disregard developer experience in favor of faster delivery and cheaper costs. Trust me, there are so many ways to “just make” things, which, alas, are not sustainable in the long run.

You must be interested in making your developers as happy as possible while delivering solutions for your company. Kotlin is a great choice because it was created for developers by developers, who are actually working on the best ever IDE (Integrated Developer Environment) — IntelliJ platform.

You can expect deep integration between language, platform, and tools. This all provides the most powerful, efficient and flawless experience I ever had with any language. Make your developers happy, choose Kotlin!

Bottom line

There are not just these 6 reasons to choose Kotlin as the main language for your startup. There are many more, but we just can’t cover all of them in one article. Of course, like any language, it has its very own drawbacks and compromises, but nothing is perfect.

Still not convinced? Or need a team specialized in Kotlin for your startup? Don’t hesitate to drop us a line at hello@xorum.io. We are always happy to discuss the latest trends, give consultation and consider new opportunities.

Bonus: Want to keep in touch with Kotlin? Subscribe for http://www.kotlinweekly.net/.