Anyway, that's my point. Apple iterated Swift quickly in 3 years, and Swift is a very nice language now. Some sort of support, or even acknowledgement, from Google could have accelerated Kotlin.
Given that most developers still complain about the state of Swift and its tooling I'm not sure Google's approach is wrong here. Most serious Android developers have been aware about Kotlin for a while, and today it's mature enough to be openly endorsed by Google.
Right. Swift might be done in version 4.0. Or even 5.0. No ABI stability for example so you're always shipping up to 10MB of Swift runtimes with your app, which is still a considered a lot for a mobile app unless you work at Facebook. The constant IDE crashes are gone luckily but sometimes compiling gets reaaallllyyyy slllooowwwwww all of a sudden just when your product hits a certain critical complexity.
Seems that automatic type inference is something that's really nice for one page programs but explodes in complexity for the compiler once you start to do it in big programs with complex structures (nested dictionaries) or methods (like chaining flatMap with filter with join).
I'm trying to work with R.Swift and IBAnalyzer nowadays to have a 100% "if it compiles it doesn't crash" solution even while using Storyboards and that alone increases my productivity more than any left over annoyances at the moment might decrease.
Swift 1.x was horrible though. I had to pick up a project left half finished by a junior to finish it. What a nightmare. Every new Xcode point release broke everything
https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2012/04/kotlin-m1-is-out/