Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile — An iOS Engineer’s Hot Take

Originally published at blog.malcolmk.com.

In this article, I will be discussing why I believe that Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) is the future of cross-platform development from the viewpoint of an iOS Engineer.

This is a highly opinionated piece and I am very aware that some might have opposing opinions hence — hot take.

Hot Take (noun) — a piece of writing or speech, especially on the internet, giving someone’s personal opinions about a topic, usually strong opinions that have not been carefully thought about and that many people are likely to disagree with Cambridge Dictionary

Have you ever downloaded an app, opened it, browsed through it, and think something just does not feel right? Ever wondered why an app is not smooth and why some elements seem out of place? It could be that the app in question was developed using a cross-platform framework.

The promise of cross-platform development is “code once, deploy everywhere”. Whilst frameworks like React-Native and Flutter do really well to deliver on this promise there are some caveats that raise concern. User Interface and latest platform features is an area in which I feel like these frameworks fall short. In practice, this may not be the fault of the framework but rather that of the…