One could argue: “I’m an iOS developer, I want to use native frameworks from my platform, I don’t want to use another cross-platform thing and spend hours to adapt the code to render the native things I want”. It would be difficult to argue that doing the same thing twice (or more) on different platforms could be beneficial for anyone. That serialized data might be retrieved in the future to be part of a bigger thing in a POST call and so forth. When developing mobile native applications, a lot of Android and iOS code ends up doing the same thing: make a GET call to retrieve a list of something, map this JSON data into an object/class/struct, serialize it and save it into the local storage using some native frameworks depending on the platform. Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) is an SDK that allows you to use the same business logic code in both iOS and Android applications. Here is the short definition of what KMM is from Jetbrains, the company which developed this technology.

This should not be an issue for Android developers as it mostly uses tools they are proficient with. Since my skill level on the Android platform is near zero, this article will mainly focus on the pros and cons an iOS developer may encounter. I’ll try to explain how we use Kotlin Multiplatform from both Android and iOS points of views. I’m Guillaume Berthier, a software engineer and an iOS developer at Fabernovel for the past 4 years. We have taken the opportunity to explore Kotlin Multiplatform on a production mobile app and to consider the benefits of using it on our future projects, here is the story of our journey. 2021 has been a year of change for everybody, including for some of the iOS and Android developers at Fabernovel.

Kotlin multiplatform ios example