With Go 1.5, Go will support mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and will provide tools to build mobile applications.

There are two strategies you can follow to include Go into your mobile stack:

• Writing all-Go native mobile applications.
• Writing SDK applications by generating bindings from a Go package and invoke them from Java (on Android) and Objective-C (on iOS).

This article will contain step-by-step guides to explain how to achieve these strategies.

Tooling

Go Mobile introduces a new tool, gomobile, to help you with the build and the binding process. Go get gomobile and initialize it to install the required toolchain.

On Mac OSX, you will need to have Xcode Command Line Tools installed.

$ go get golang.org/x/mobile/cmd/gomobile
$ gomobile init # it might take a few minutes

(The following sections will help you how to use the gomobile tool.)

Native applications

Native category includes applications entirely written in Go. Currently, the mobile standard library contains only a handful of packages.

• App control and configuration
• OpenGL ES 2 bindings
• Asset management
• Event management
• Experimental packages include OpenAL bindings, audio, font, sprite and motion sensors.

TODO

SDK applications and generating bindings

In this category, we will show you how you can use a Go package in your existing Android or iOS application.

The advantages to follow this strategy:

• You can reuse a Go package from a mobile app without making significant changes to your existing application.
• In cases where you want to share a partial common code base between your Android and iOS application, you can write the common functionality once in Go and glue them to the platform-specific code by invoking the Go package through bindings.

The disadvantages include the following:

• Only a subset of Go types are currently supported.
• Language bindings have a performance overhead.
• There are a few limitiations on how the exported APIs should look like due to the limitiations of the target language.

TODO