I’ve done some Android development with Kotlin recently (a team of 6 at http://monzo.com). I like the Kotlin language better than Java and I like static typing.

One of the main points in the article is that builds are too slow. I didn’t have to wait for builds for 20 minutes with Kotlin, but I did have to wait for 30s-60s, and this was quite a small app.

It’s much better to wait for compilation 2 seconds than 60. This is hard to explain unless you try it for yourself. I used to be a .NET developer and I used to sit around and wait for the compiler. I thought it was normal, until I tried technologies where you don’t wait, and suddenly it’s hard to go back to waiting.

If you like static typing, Flutter uses Dart which has static typing, and in React Native it’s possible to use TypeScript or Reason.

> Normally coming from something like IntelliJ working with web tools is just horrible but maybe I need to checkout what MS has in the game now. But does it work on Mac? ☺

IntelliJ is awesome. Flutter has an Android Studio plugin which looked pretty good. For React Native it’s mostly Atom or VSCode. All of those work on Mac. It’s hard to beat the awesome tooling for Java and Kotlin in IntelliJ so yes, I think the other tools are still not as good.