Google mulling deep Android support for Apple's Swift language - report

Google discussed the idea of bringing Swift into Android with at least two major third-party developers — Facebook and Uber — according to The Next Web. Those talks are said to have taken place late last year in London, though they remain preliminary.

The search giant is thought to be feeling out potential long-term replacements for Java, over which it is embroiled in a long-running legal spat with Oracle.

Any official Android implementation of Swift would not replace Java immediately, though. Nearly every user-facing piece of the operating system would need to be rewritten from the ground up, as well as a huge portion of Android's core.

Such a move could prove attractive for developers, who would be able to more easily create native cross-platform apps.

Also under consideration for Google is Kotlin, a language designed by Java-focused development company JetBrains and designed to be interoperable with Java. Google is said to have concerns about Kotlin's speed, however, preferring Swift's "upside" over both Kotlin and Java.