That is my current impression. Practically speaking, this is huge off course, but it's nothing inherent to Swift. Apple could have embraced any language, no matter what it was like, good or bad, and it be on this privilege position that would undoubtedly make it successful.

And up until now, I was thinking I'll try Swift the day I'm forced too, because I'm working to develop an app for Mac or iOS.

But then I started seeing some comments like: "For me, Swift is currently the most interesting language". So I thought I might be overlooking something.

The most innovative feature I can find is null safety, which is alright, but I guess I've had my fun with it with Kotlin already. Someone mentioned good ABI compatibility, that is interesting, and I'll need to read up on that. Others say, it's just a nice mix of modern features in a well maintained package. That's great as well, you could argue C# and Java being older have some less modern aspects lingering. But that's nothing that makes me want to jump in it and try to use it for my next project.

While a huge boon for the poor ObjC devs, this doesn't seem like much of a thing for the rest of the world.

Also, through the various *Kit libraries and now (sooner or later) SwiftUI, Apple is staking out a rapid-development territory that will be hard for the other ecosystem(s?) to match.

So, if you have to choose between making your app for iOS first, or Android first, then in addition to any consideration of markets which might or might not apply to your business model, you will have a very strong incentive to choose Apple for time to production.

I would love to see more serious competition on that front.