Swift for Android vs. Kotlin Multiplatform

3 days ago

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Swift for Android is now available as an early developer preview, formalizing years of toolchain hacks for cross-platform development.
Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) has been a preferred cross-platform solution for native mobile developers, allowing shared business logic with native UIs.
The article compares Swift for Android and KMP by building two apps: one powered by Swift for Android (Jetpack Compose) and another by KMP (SwiftUI).
Swift for Android uses JNI bindings to allow Android apps to call Swift code, while KMP generates Objective-C headers for Kotlin code to be used in iOS.
Both tools have rough edges, especially at the module boundary, with debugging and IDE context-switching being significant pain points.
Swift for Android is new and evolving rapidly, with recent updates like async-await compatibility, but it's not yet production-ready.
KMP is more mature but has its own challenges, particularly when used from iOS due to Objective-C bridging.
The article suggests waiting for Swift for Android to stabilize before adopting it for production, while KMP remains the safer choice for now.
The author open-sourced both projects for others to explore and build upon.

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