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Kotlin adoption has been stagnating recently (subjectively) and VSCode + forks have massive market share.

It was extremely shortsighted to think that a single language would sway people to IntelliJ instead of just limiting Kotlin’s growth.

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clumsysmurf 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Kotlin dominates Android development, but Android Studio is free. Google has become more and more hostile towards indie Play Store developers, so in 2025 it is more risky and less lucrative. Kotlin's "home turf" (Android) may be losing developers faster faster than Jetbrains can gain them on other platforms.

I assume its will be a polyglot world for some time to come, and devs that decide to retool into another stack could use anything else, leaving Kotlin behind.

	▲	sgammon 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Android Studio is only "free" to the user.

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mike_hearn 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hardly shortsighted. IntelliJ has a business model, Kotlin doesn't. Maximizing Kotlin usage does nothing for Jetbrains directly, just creates costs. And sure it brings people to IntelliJ, more importantly, it keeps them there.

It's kinda like describing Apple as short sighted for not giving away the source code to all their frameworks. Doing so would maximise usage but that's not their goal.

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wiseowise 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Maximizing Kotlin usage does nothing for Jetbrains directly, just creates costs.

It brings mindshare and brand value. And it brings direct revenue in business contracts (I hope they get a hefty fee for supporting Google with Android Studio).

It is also investment in the future. How many student curriculums, courses, tutorials use IntelliJ over VSCode? And how many of them convert to IntelliJ later? IntelliJ is always seen as that heavy industrial combiner for professional workers compared to nimble and hype VSCode.

> And sure it brings people to IntelliJ, more importantly, it keeps them there.

I might be a vocal minority here, but it keeps nothing but resentment in me.

> It's kinda like describing Apple as short sighted for not giving away the source code to all their frameworks. Doing so would maximise usage but that's not their goal.

Apple is trillion dollar hardware company with completely locked down ecosystem with millions (billion?) of people using their products. They can do whatever the f*k they want and developers will dance to their tune.

The comparison you’re looking for is Borland. Delphi was once far more popular than Kotlin right now, and look how it ended up.

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mike_hearn 2 days ago | parent [-]

Google pay JetBrains nothing for Android Studio. Source: I talked to them at KotlinConf about it. Why would they? Do you see Google taking out huge contracts with Oracle for Java, or Red Hat for Linux? Google hardly even contributes to upstream projects, let alone funds them via fat support contracts. They prefer to develop everything in house, acquire outright or maintain their own forks if that isn't viable.

Google are members of the Kotlin Foundation. I guess as part of that they contribute towards the cost of the yearly conference. They've also generously open sourced some of the frameworks they built for Android. But go review the commit logs for IntelliJ or Kotlin and you'll see they're nearly all JB employees.

As for the rest, words have meaning. "Brand value" means people are willing to pay for things associated with that brand. "Investment" means something that can potentially yield ROI. Something given away for free with no supporting business model isn't an investment, it's charity.

The internet is littered with bitrotting projects that were treated as charity and then abandoned when the authors got tired of it. Apache fills up with more every year. The right comparison is thus not with Delphi (which made Borland a ton of money and is still on sale today via Embarcadero), but with NetBeans and Eclipse, both codebases abandoned by their former sponsors when the novelty value of having lots of users wore off.

> I might be a vocal minority here, but it keeps nothing but resentment in me.

OK, so don't use it then. Kotlin, at least in the JVM or JS variants, isn't the sort of language that requires a huge level of buy-in. I started using it before Kotlin 1.0 even came out, used it for the next decade after that, and was happy with it at every point. Back in those days the community was tiny but that doesn't matter due to its excellent JVM interop. At no point did I ever have any fear other than JetBrains not making enough money with it and defunding it. Fortunately, being a smart company, they haven't fallen into that trap.

	▲	pjmlp 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Eclipse is relevant enough in big corporations that Microsoft has had to change their Java tooling offerings to support it just as well, regardless of the coolness factor in coffee shops coding.