I just followed the Reddit AMA by the Google’s Jet...

# multiplatform

[Daniele B]

I just followed the Reddit AMA by the Google’s Jetpack team.

The Google guys said that they are focused on implementing Jetpack Compose on Android, but at the same time the framework and the compiler are open source and platform agnostic. They mentioned that JetBrains is currently contributing changes to use Jetpack Compose on desktop platforms.

I definitely can see Jetpack Compose becoming a multiplatform UI framework. There will be an increasing demand from the community for it to work on iOS too, similarly to what Flutter does, with the advantage of leveraging the power of Kotlin.

Whether the porting will be done by Google or by JetBrains or by the open source community, that will be irrelevant. It will happen someday. Give it 2 years 🙂

But in order for a Jetpack Compose UI to be multiplatform, it should have no dependencies on the Android View system. For example at the moment, I understand that MapView and WebView will not be rewritten. If it’s true that the Android team is not going to rewrite them, the “multiplatform team” will need to work on these too.

Overall I think Kotlin MultiPlatform is unstoppable. And its UI framework kit will very sensibly be Jetpack Compose.

I think in the same way you can now write an Android Kotlin app by using an Android-specific observable (LiveData) or a MultiPlatform observable (StateFlow), it will be possible to write the app by using an Android-specific UI framework (Google’s Jetpack Compose implementation) or a Multiplatform UI framework (JetBrains(?)’s Jetpack Compose implementation).