Introducing the Swift SDK for Android

Swift has rapidly grown beyond its origins on Apple platforms, becoming a powerful language for systems programming, server-side development, and cross-platform applications. Over the past few years, steady progress in tooling, language portability, and community experimentation has made it increasingly viable to use Swift for Android application development, culminating with the formation of the Swift Android workgroup in 2025 and the release of the Swift SDK for Android. This talk explores the current state of Swift on Android, focusing on what is practical today, what teams are already shipping, and how the ecosystem may evolve in the coming years. We will begin with an overview of how Swift code can be compiled and executed on Android, including the role of the Swift toolchain, cross-compilation SDKs, and interaction with the Android runtime. From there, the talk will dive into integration with the Android SDK, covering common patterns for calling Java and Kotlin APIs from Swift, bridging via JNI, and leveraging existing Android libraries without rewriting entire stacks. User interface strategies will be discussed, comparing approaches such as using Kotlin or Java Android UI frameworks (Views and Jetpack Compose) alongside Swift-based business logic, as well as other solutions for higher-level UI abstraction. Particular attention will be given to real-world tradeoffs in performance, developer experience, and maintainability. Finally, the talk will address the challenges of tooling interoperability, examining how Swift Package Manager can coexist with Gradle and Android Studio, and what smoother workflows might look like in the future. Attendees will leave with a clear picture of what is possible today, where the rough edges remain, and how Swift is maturing into a first-class cross-platform option for creating universal apps from a single codebase. Speaker Bio Marc Prud'hommeaux is a longtime contributor to the Swift project and the creator of skip.tools, which enables the creation of dual-platform iOS/Android apps in Swift. He is a founding member of the Swift Android Workgroup.