If you want to use bleeding-edge tech, expect to bleed. But the current tooling for multiplatform is painful. So is Kotlin multiplatform wonderful to use? I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you. If, on the other hand, Google buys JetBrains… then you can throw all your Kotlin multiplatform code in the trash. As long as that remains true, Kotlin multiplatform will improve. And if they get more developers writing code in Kotlin, they can sell more IDE subscriptions. And after all that, how do you monetize it ? Well, we got lucky. Building something like this involves a ton of money and effort. Clearly, the reason is a lack of business incentives. It’s so obvious, one wonders how it took so long to appear.

And then build your shared business logic using a modern language. Build your UI using native tools - using SwiftUI for example. Finally a sane narrative for cross-platform development. It goes against their business model.Īnd then there was Kotlin Multiplatform. They don’t want to help you make iOS apps. Because that’s a completely different market. Do they provide Windows support for Swift? Nope. Does Apple provide Android support for Swift? Nope. Well… Swift has been out for many years now. Why would Apple want to help you make apps for Android ? It goes against their business model. We will be able to write Android apps in Swift !!!” But I was skeptical. And I remember hearing the other devs wax poetic about how “Swift is the new cross-platform language because it’s open source. I was at WWDC when Apple announced Swift. Don’t expect them to be kind to your crappy UI, and your non-existent animations. Except now replace your user base with people who have never heard of AOL, and who grew up using the latest smartphones. Do you remember those horrible cross-platform Java apps from the 2000’s (with user interfaces made with Swing) ? It’s like that.

Which is a clearly a good idea - to those who have never written a native mobile app in their life. I wouldn’t wish it on my enemies.Īnd then there are the “let’s just use a web framework” solutions. But for the last decade, the dream has remained just that. For mobile developers, the dream has always been to have a modern language for sharing code between iOS & Android.

Kotlin to ios