At Google I/O 2017, Google announced official support for the Kotlin programming language. The language has been in development for a few years and has interoperability with existing Java code, making it an attractive choice for developers already familiar with Java. Twilio, the company behind the article, was looking to improve their Android SDK by reducing boilerplate code and improving maintainability. They used Android Studio 3.0 and its Kotlin support to refactor their Java code into cleaner, more idiomatic Kotlin code, utilizing features like autogenerated UI element accessors, apply(), and Anko for defining clean views programmatically. The company also explored JavaScript support with Kotlin, demonstrating the language's versatility in web programming. Overall, Kotlin offers a more pleasant coding experience and improved maintainability, making it an attractive choice for developers looking to improve their code.