With all the attention on Go and Rust, I’m not exactly going out on a limb recommending them. By comparison, Kotlin might seem like a bit of a dark horse. But don’t get me wrong, this open-source language developed at JetBrains enjoys some well-deserved buzz.

That’s largely thanks to Google’s 2019 announcement of Kotlin as the preferred language for Android operating system development. Of course, Google may have been thinking about more than Kotlin’s capabilities.

You might recall Google’s U.S. Supreme Court victory over Oracle in April 2021. The justices found that Google didn’t infringe on Oracle’s copyright of Java SE when it used Java APIs while developing its Android mobile platform for app developers. This ruling capped off more than a decade of litigation between the two companies, starting when Oracle sued Google in 2010. (By the time of the Supreme Court decision, Google had created a “clean room implementation” for Android to be compatible with Java without using its code.)

While this context is important, Kotlin is more than a Java alternative, and Google isn’t the only major player to recognize that. Companies and platforms that use Kotlin in production include:

Netflix

Uber

Slack

Evernote’s Android client

The Spring Java platform

Atlassian’s Trello app for * Android

Gradle, an open-source build tool

Corda, an open-source distributed ledger platform

Increasing industry adoption means increasing demand for Kotlin developers, but there are other reasons to learn this language.