Poster: Kotlin Assimilating the Android Ecosystem - An Appraisal of Diffusion and Impact on Maintainability

Kotlin is a language alternative to Java, introduced in 2011. It promises to address many of Java's limitations and lead to better application maintainability. In 2017, it became a first-class language for Android development with full tool support. We mined a dataset of 2708 Android applications on which we based our study. Our empirical assessment of the diffusion of Kotlin in Android app development shows that it is now used in around 40% of projects. Kotlin adoption has a significant positive effect on code maintainability metrics and in popularity among end-users and developers. Overall, Kotlin appears to be successfully fulfilling its promise of being a better Java for Android development.