• Exploring the Swift SDK for Android Since the announcement of the preview Swift SDK for Android, the Android workgroup has seen a lot of interest in how it works and what’s next. • Please read on for some answers to common questions about the technology and its future, and try out the new Swift 6.3 SDK nightly previews. • How Swift works on Android Swift compiles directly to native machine code on Android, the same way it does on most other platforms. • This approach produces similar performance to C and C++ code built using the Android Native Development Kit (NDK), while achieving a happier balance between performance, safety, and usability. • To make this possible, Swift apps on Android bundle a native runtime that implements many of its features, including its standard library and core libraries, like Dispatch and Foundation. • However, since most Android APIs are only made available through Java and Kotlin, Swift must call into the Android Runtime (ART); that’s where the Java interoperability project’s jextract and wrap-java tools come in.
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