JetBrains›JetBrains› offers Kotlin

Kotlin is fully interoperable with Java, so teams can introduce it gradually into existing codebases and mix both languages freely within one project. Compiler-enforced null safety and concise declarations reduce boilerplate and entire classes of runtime errors compared with Java.

Kotlin Multiplatform lets teams share business logic across Android, iOS, and other operating systems while keeping native user interfaces, and first-class IDE support in IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio lowers the adoption cost for existing JVM teams.

Kotlin is an open-source, statically typed programming language created by JetBrains. Work on the project began in 2010, and on July 19, 2011 JetBrains unveiled it at the JVM Language Summit as a new language for the Java Virtual Machine. The name references Kotlin Island near Saint Petersburg, following the convention of naming programming languages after islands established by Java.

The language was open-sourced early under the Apache 2.0 license, and Kotlin 1.0, the first officially stable release, shipped in February 2016. In May 2017 Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on Android at the Google I/O keynote, and JetBrains and Google subsequently established the nonprofit Kotlin Foundation to protect the Kotlin trademark and support the ecosystem. Kotlin is developed by a JetBrains engineering team of over one hundred people with a large external contributor community.

Kotlin has a large and actively growing ecosystem: the Kotlin Foundation reports 2.5 million developers regularly writing Kotlin, 1.65 million GitHub repositories using Kotlin as a primary language, and more than 400 universities teaching it.

Google has made Android development increasingly Kotlin-first since 2019, and the language continues to expand beyond Android into server-side, web, and native multiplatform development, with regular language releases such as Kotlin 2.4.20 in September 2026.

Kotlin itself is free and open source, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license with development hosted publicly on GitHub, so there is no charge for using the language or its standard library.

JetBrains monetizes the surrounding ecosystem rather than the language: the IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio distributions bundle Kotlin support, and JetBrains sells commercial IDE subscriptions and related tooling while keeping the language and compiler freely available.

Kotlin is a modern, general-purpose programming language created and maintained by JetBrains. It is designed to be concise and multiplatform, with full interoperability with Java and other languages.

Kotlin targets console and backend applications, Android, cross-platform mobile through Kotlin Multiplatform, and data analysis workflows. It ships inside IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, and its standard tooling is open source under the Apache 2.0 license.