How To Build A Cross Platform Mobile App With Kotlin Multiplatform 1/2 — Shared Code

Combining the power of Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile, Swift UI, and Jetpack Compose

When it comes to getting into mobile app development, you have to choose the blue or the red pill. Either you start learning Android or iOS. Which of the two is ultimately the blue and which is the red pill is up to you.

However, with frameworks like React Native or Flutter, you can swallow both at once. Such cross-platform frameworks aim to let you write your code once and export it to multiple platforms.

Even though this can be achieved for most of the apps, when it comes to accessing native platform code, you quickly end up implementing your own, platform-dependent solution.

While such frameworks are good at unifying the code base, on the UI part they take some advantages when it comes to making use of the latest native UI components. You may even end up with not only a completely unified app code but with the exact same UI without leaving any reference to the platform it’s running on.

In some cases this can be desired, in some, you may want to use the latest UI framework APIs and give each of the apps a unique look and feel while still providing some familiar…