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Comment by anupamchugh | Hacker News Reader

This is a big move! I haven't seen many people use Kotlin Multiplatform for mobile app dev. Personally, never trusted Google due to their inability to stick with one technology. They have Kotlin Multiplatform and Flutter both for cross platform development. But Netflix's strategy might just encourage others to adopt too.

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As has been pointed out, Kotlin is not really controlled by Google the way that Flutter is.

Also Kotlin Multiplatform and Flutter are very, very different use cases.

For anyone who isn't aware:

Kotlin Multiplatform lets you share business logic. Think "make a library that can be used on iOS and Android". You still need to write the UI and platform-specific plumbing separately for each.

Flutter includes the UI and can give you apps running on both platforms (and web and desktop, too!) with 100% shared code†.

†In practice, though, you may need to get your hands dirty with platform-native code for functionality not already covered by the plugin ecosystem, though that need diminishes over time.

Flutter is more controlled by Ad Words team than Google as a whole, without it there wouldn't exist any Dart.

Kotlin isn't really a Google project (although they adopted it). It's made by Jetbrains.

Kotlin has many full time paid compiler developers by Google

Do you have a source for this? I develop a plug-in for JetBrains IDEs professionally, I talk a lot to people there and I’ve never heard this.

Just look at the paid members of the kotlin foundation: (Ctrl find Google) https://kotlinlang.org/foundation/kotlin-foundation.html#kot...

https://github.com/jsjeon is probably the most prolific one as I often see him in the commit history.

BTW which plugin are you working on?

But if you look at the contributor history for the repo, he's at #54, just after JetBrains' actual CEO. I don't think you could make the claim that Google contribute significantly to the language itself based off that.

I develop https://cursive-ide.com.

Hi Colin. What's CursiveIDE made of? It's not written in Clojure, is it?

It's written in a mix of Java (older legacy code), Kotlin (new non-Clojure code) and Clojure.

Long term given the lack of motivation to support modern Java on Android, Kotlin will be tied to Android anyway as it will need to choose how much Java/JVM it can support and still be the Google loved child for future Android development.

Yeah it does seem odd theyre pushing both flutter/dart and jetpack/kotlin, usually more choice is a good thing, but I'm increasingly uncomfortable about the effect on Kotlin if google goes full in on flutter instead

I wouldn't be too worried. I mean I think it's possible but I feel like it's a while away.

As a native Android dev, my arm-chair hypothesis is that currently both of those (kotlin, flutter) are targeting different developers and until either one starts including the other developers then I don't see any one winning over.

Kotlin - loved by native devs Flutter/Dart - web devs (previous experience with JS)

*I'm biased as a Native android dev but from my experience this is the case. Also Kotlin is really a great/fun(ctional)/expressive language

Google is currently designing jetpack compose which is their latest UI framework and is in Kotlin, I don't see them dropping such a wonderful language. Flutter on the other hands might just disappear

Flutter has been a Ad Words team all along, go watch Android Fireside sessions at past Google IO to watch the teams political correct answers when asked about their opinion related to Flutter.

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