Anything is better than Java 6 for Android dev. Java 8 support is now available which is a huge improvement, but Kotlin is still much more fun to work with. Flutter is also getting more usable, but not ready for production apps yet. So your options are Flutter from Dart, Kotlin, Cordova (which you can also mix with Dart if you don't enjoy JS), Ionic (I didn't enjoy the TypeScript experience) and React Native ( which I haven't tried yet). If you're from a C# background, Xamarin is also an option