On iOS, you have to use the native library interface to access the shared code. The shared code is created with Kotlin, which is more familiar to Android developers. There are also still some limits on iOS application debugging in shared code. You can expect these things to improve later on. When using iOS, the project can currently need a complete rebuild, which takes a long time.

IOS developers have to learn a new language similar to Swift when they do development in shared code. Making KMM stable is the top priority on the latest Kotlin roadmap update from December. KMM is still in beta, so you can wait for it to improve. You have to make some wrappers and not all the Kotlin features are supported on the iOS side. There are still some problems, mainly in the shared interface, or how the shared code (Kotlin) is presented on the iOS (Swift) side. There are 106k lines of shared code, 55k lines of Android code, and 42k lines of iOS code. In one KMM project of this kind currently in production, 52 percent of the code is shared. You are not limited to using the framework components and don’t have to wait for the frameworks to start supporting something that Google or Apple have just released in their latest updates. When developing the UI the native way, you also get the latest and greatest UI, just as if you were building the app as two separate native applications. Then you also have the same bugs and only need to fix them in one place. The most important one is that you have the same implementation for features, so they work exactly the same and not just almost the same. The article is still otherwise pretty much up to date, but KMM was not yet an option back then, so this article will complement that story.

The idea is to get the best of both worlds – shared code and native components and speed.Ī few years ago, we wrote an article about choosing the right app technology, which compared the benefits of native, hybrid and cross-platform. KMM is the new alternative to Native and Cross-platforms like Flutter and ReactNative. The KMM is the mobile part of the wider Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) SDK, which you can use to develop applications also for JVM, JavaScript, Windows, Linux, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

Kmm ios