In the term that any app could be made for both Android and iPhone with the same codebase, I think that would benefit all. Right now companies just waste money on developing 2 times and I don't see the amount of users per iPhone and Android should change just because they have more of the same apps, currently all major apps are made for both anyway.
Android devs already have Kotlin at their disposal - which, by the way, happens to be uncannily similar to Swift, syntactically at least.
It already has a small but loyal following, it offers 100% Java interoperability, it's backed up by JetBrains, so it's seamlessly supported by IntelliJ Idea / Android Studio, it's been highly regarded by quite a few influential figures in Android development world. And it's not controlled by Google's most serious competitor (in mobile, of course); open-source or not, this could be a liability.
And at any rate, as far as I can tell, Google adopting Swift is merely a rumour at this point.
For reasons given above, I'd rather see Google give an official blessing to Kotlin.
General trend today has been, products are introduced first for iOS and then brought into android, depending on the success of the product. So android is always catching up to ios. If Google adopts swift, then products will be available more or less the same time, because the codebase will be the same.
Since Apple open sourced Swift, swift is moving to server side as well. So lot of developers are excited and learning swift. Days are not far when a UI kit will be made for android (swift already compiles for android). If Google adopts swift like it embraced Typescript by MSFT, then it will bring lot of developers into Android platform too.
I see advantages for Google to embrace swift. But hey...I am not Sunder Pitchai (though, I am from the same state).
Denny Trebbin
Lead Fullstack Developer. Experimenting with bleeding-edge tech. Irregularly DJ. Hobby drone pilot. Amateur photographer.
Oracle sued Google for using Java API's in Android. Oracle want'ts to make Google pay $3bln. The Whitehouse voiced pro-Oracle just recently. Facebook, Google, and Netflix meet some days ago and talked about replacing Java. All 3 big players looked at Swift. But Google has a problem with Swift. Android can't run Swift code yet. The Android Developer Studio doesn't support Swift too. Neither has Google any library ready app developers can use to integrate their nicely into Android.