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What are Swift and Kotlin used for?

Swift is Apple's language for building iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. Kotlin is the preferred language for Android apps and is fully backed by Google. If you're building a native mobile app for one platform, these are the standard choices, Swift for Apple devices and Kotlin for Android.

Both are modern, safe, and pleasant to write, having replaced older languages (Objective-C for Apple, Java for Android) as the recommended default. They give the best access to each platform's features and performance.

The catch is that they're platform-specific: a Swift app doesn't run on Android and vice versa. Teams wanting one codebase for both often use a cross-platform framework like Flutter or React Native instead, trading a little native polish for building once.

Updated July 2026

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