Kotlin was officially announced for Android development by Google in 2017.
JetBrains began developing Kotlin in 2010, and the company released Kotlin 1.0 in 2016. The language targets the Java Virtual Machine and can interoperate closely with Java, allowing many existing Java libraries and projects to be used from Kotlin.
At Google I/O in 2017, Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on Android. In 2019, Google said Android development would become increasingly Kotlin-first, helping the language become a major choice for mobile applications.
Kotlin is often compared with Scala and Groovy because all can run on the JVM, but they are separate languages. Kotlin also supports multiplatform development and can compile to JavaScript and native targets, in addition to JVM code.