Later this year, Apple will be making it's Swift programming language open source. The concept makes all the sense as it aims to re-invigorate and define new benchmarks across the mobile computing universe of phones, phablets and tablets. Of course, arguments were and will continue to be made regarding the market share of Apple vs the glut of Android based devices, however Swift may be a game changer. There have already been attempts at making a compiler that can convert Swift code into Java byte code that can then be converted into an Android Package (APK) for installation on Android Devices (Use Apple Swift to make an Android App). Once Swift is released as Open Source, there will definitely more attempts at this. Think about companies who would like to write it once and release their apps to both iOS and Android based devices.
Swift Playgrounds lets you see the results for every line of code that is typed. This lends itself naturally to viewing UI changes specially code snippets for an animated SpriteKit scene. Stay tuned for the Open Source Launch and get ready for a new mobile app development era.
