mihael

Thanks

It’s a different approach with different goals.

SwifDroid is about native Android development in Swift. You’re not writing cross-platform UI. You’re writing Android-specific UI in Swift, using Android’s own view system and APIs directly. The goal is to enable full, idiomatic Android apps entirely in Swift, including activities, fragments, AndroidX, and Material, without touching Java, Kotlin, or XML.

While the others focus on “write UI once, run anywhere,” often with trade-offs in UX, SwifDroid focuses on writing natively for Android and having full control from Swift.

It works primarily through the jni-kit library, which handles JNI bindings between Swift and Java/Kotlin. You can check out the full docs here: https://docs.swifdroid.com/jni-kit/

On top of that, the IDE also auto-generates required Java/Kotlin classes on the fly, for example, for Activities.

Yes, since we need Gradle dependencies in order to build rich UI with AndroidX or Material Design. But if you're interested in a minimal approach without Gradle, check out the example by @purpln here: https://github.com/purpln/android-example

Yes, exactly. SwifDroid automatically wires all the necessary Gradle dependencies, so you don’t have to manage them manually.

I just released Swift Stream IDE v1.17.0, which now supports full native Android app development entirely in Swift. You can build apps without touching XML, Java, or Kotlin.

Under the hood, projects are powered by SwifDroid, a framework I built that handles the Android application lifecycle, activities, fragments, and UI widgets (Android, AndroidX, Material, Flexbox) while automatically managing Gradle dependencies. The IDE compiles Swift, generates a full Android project ready for Android Studio.

This is the first public release. Both tooling and framework are open-source and MIT-licensed.