Kotlin is missing all of the most powerful Scala features. No type classes, monadic comprehension, higher kinded types, adhoc polymoprhism. :(
I tried to use Scala for Android in the past and I gave up after attempting to set it up for a few hours. Admittedly it was a while back, perhaps things have improved.
Your claim that Scala on Android works fine got me interested again, so I googled around, found that blog post from May this year (that's more recent than my own experiments), and apparently there are still hurdles: http://blog.scalac.io/2016/05/19/reflections-on-starting-and...
With this type of issues the thing that I'm wary about is not getting a "hello world" app to compile once, but that I can get a project up and running, then need to add something else to the equation (say, a DI, or some code processor), and things fall apart again in an X-Files fashion.
I've heard that Scala has long build times, too, but maybe it's a thing of the past as well - no first-hand experience here as I never got to that stage.
Just use sbt-android and skip all the other nonsense.
Compilation is impressively fast, as the plugin uses the information from incremental compilation to skip ProGuarding completely for things that haven't changed.
I do like many of the more powerful features that Scala has, but Kotlin strikes a right balance of simplicity and power in my opinion.
That being said, yes Scala has a steeper learning curve than say, Kotlin or Go. But if you're going to devote the I don't know, next ten years of your life to working in a particular language, does it really matter if it takes two months vs. four months to ramp up?
Plenty of "ok-ish, but not too hard to learn" languages proliferate in that kind of climate, like go for small web services (where Erlang was too much of an investment). The Unix approach of 1001 ad hoc sub-languages (awk, pic, ed...) adapted.
Quite different from e.g. a J2EE developer's approach, who tends to think of career-defining technologies and languages, where Scala seems like a wise investment.
1 - Install plugin into Android Studio
2 - Configure the Gradle plugin
Enjoy Android development within Studio.
Scala:
Follow this several pages long tutorial:
https://www.voxxed.com/blog/2016/10/setting-up-scala-on-andr...
Try to enjoy while working around issues with Studio integration and common Android libraries.
A programming with more features is not necessarily better. The limited features of Kotlin (compared to Scala) are an advantage, if you change your point of view. Some advantages:
* easier to learn (a Java dev will be more productive than in Java in a day or two)
* easier to maintain since Kotlin doesn't allow so much hard to understand code constructs
* fewer discussions about the one true style or way to do something
* it's easier to build good tooling
* much faster compilation
* smoother Java interop
* performance implications are more predictable