should i develop my mobile app in Kotlin? I am int...

# getting-started

[Nick Chong]

should i develop my mobile app in Kotlin? I am intending to have it run on iOS and Android

[Johann Pardanaud]

Obviously, you will get biased answers here 😄

[Johann Pardanaud]

But yes 😛

[Johann Pardanaud]

With Kotlin Multiplatform you will be able to write all the business logic once and share it across your platforms

[Johann Pardanaud]

With Compose Multiplatform you can even share the UI, but this is a matter of taste because then you will not use the native UI framework on iOS, which can be a blocker for some

[Robert Williams]

I'd say depends how comfortable you are with actually writing a native (iOS/ Android) app. KMP will let you share a lot of code but you're still responsible for actually making it work on the platforms.

[Robert Williams]

If you really don't want to deal with that, something like Flutter or React Native might be a better fit

[Nick Chong]

I am in no rush in rolling out the mobile app. I did invest time in my current internship in Kotlin, Java and Gradle projects such as writing compiler plugin and Gradle plugins. I rarely touch JS/TS. Hence I do have some bias too 🙃 Always thought it was just another JVM language and from my undergrad course it was just taught as a language to build android app. After diving into some capabilities of Kotlin, especially how it can be use to compile for different platform, I personally like how powerful Kotlin is. Just wondering what are the current limitations in building a crossplatform ios andriod app using Kotlin ecosystem.

[Pablichjenkov]

There aren't many limitations, interoperability with the other languages is almost 99% guaranteed. The major drawbacks are the lack of libraries, and getting proficient in other platforms, in things like, Xcode debugging for instance.
In regards to libraries, you can always depend on an abstraction in the common code and use the real implementation based on the specific platform. That solves the problem of missing libraries. But you have to code the wrapper and find common ground between the platforms, sometimes not trivial because Apple/Google API designs are very far away. Things of that nature are the inconveniences