Not a technical doubt. Most of the contributions ...

# multiplatform

[Sanjeeviraj M]

Not a technical doubt.
Most of the contributions for KMP is from Jetbrains.
How are they going to monetize it?
Particularly for iOS.
People are not going to buy IDE to use KMO. Because Android Studio is already free.

[Casey Brooks]

JetBrains makes the majority of their revenue from selling licenses to their other IDES, especially when sold to companies rather than individuals, since a business license is like 2-3x more than an individual license.

And people absolutely will pay for Intellij licenses, even though Android Studio and Intellij CE are free. There’s a ton of extra functionality in their paid version that makes it 100% worth the cost

[Pablichjenkov]

At some point AS will start taking time to acquire the latest plugin stuff for the non Android targets. While Intellij will be up-to-date. Then you will have the option to pay for a premium IDE for multiplatform or keep waiting for Android Studio to acquire the latest and greatest
I guess

[Casey Brooks]

Also worth noting: Jetbrains develops these technologies because they also use them within their company. They’re as invested in the future of these technologies as we are, because their own products depend on them.

Kotlin came about because they wanted a better language to build the Intellij Platform. Jetbrains Toolbox uses Compose Desktop. They developed Skiko for use in Compose and Fleet. Space uses Ktor. And there’s probably many more examples, too

[Sanjeeviraj M]

Jetbrains uses within their company - For other targets, it will be worth for them. IDEs can utilise Kotlin. Kotlin can run on Mac, Linux, Windows, with JVM, without JVM environment.

But for iOS target, they are putting lots of efforts, but they have only few apps. I am not sure whether this is worth for them. Particularly for iOS target.

And People uses Flutter because it is free. If they make a premium IDE, will People use it?

[Pablichjenkov]

I never used it but I heard good things about Appcode. If they bring the capabilities like fast autocompletion, swift files cmd+click navigation to kotlin files to check implementation things like that. It might be worthy

[Pablichjenkov]

I personally invest in things that save me time and at the same time help me to learn. A product offering that, I buy into it.

[Casey Brooks]

AppCode is no more, unfortunately https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-release-and-end-of-sales-and-support

[Pablichjenkov]

Yeah I know but I talked about the features could be brought to a premium multiplatform experience

[Casey Brooks]

The reality is that most software products target companies, not individuals. Individual developers that don’t generate revenue for themselves also won’t be paying for the software they use, and that’s perfectly fine. It really doesn’t cost a company much to keep those developers happy. But developers that are happy with new technology are likely to try and use it at their company. This is the main funnel that JB and many other software companies employ: have a free (or very low-cost) tier that shows individuals how valuable the software is, so that their company can use and pay for the more expensive tiers.

For instance, companies don’t use Flutter because it has a free IDE. They use it because it allows them to cut their mobile development team size in half. Even if it had a paid IDE, it’s almost certainly going to cost the company considerably less than the salary of the developers they no longer need. In Flutter’s case, the “paid tier” isn’t an IDE, it’s Google’s Firebase and other cloud services.

There’s a huge market out there of companies that would rather have a single mobile development team, rather than two. JB wants a piece of that pie, so if they can get more individual developers excited about Compose by making it run on iOS, that will translate to more companies choosing Compose and the paid version of Intellij over Flutter or React Native.

[Pablichjenkov]

That's right enterprise target enterprise 🤷🏻