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Comment by dkh | Hacker News Reader

If I had a nickel for every time I got excited about something with experimental multiplatform support...

The Kotlin platform looks good and I've kept an eye on it, but the problem is, if I have to start working on an app now, it's still kind of scary, as you're basically just placing a bet on a horse race of which one will mature the fastest down the road.

At a previous job, I decided to adopt React Native in its early stages for a project. By some miracle (and with a lot of rolling-our-own) it managed to not hold us back and seemed to mature about as fast as we needed it to, but boy, even then it was still stressful, and I feel like we got a little lucky. (Just to be clear, I also knew this going into it and the choice was mine, I may just have a deathwish)

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Take a look at skip.tools. It's pure SwiftUI on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android, with the tool automatically handling the translation from Swift to Kotlin as part of the Xcode build process.

We had a Kotlin app written with view bindings and the various other bits and pieces of Android app stack “no now this thing” detritus over the years. I hated it. I cut my teeth on 20 years of smalltalk, so it wasn’t even the “let’s hate on OO now” thing. It was just so much unfinished/inconstant things.

We have been porting to Jetpack Compose, and I really like it. It’s still got some growing pains. We don’t use ViewModels, hardly any Flow stuff, just mutable states and render trees and I’ve been pretty pleased. What makes me happiest is that it’s much more consistent. I don’t feel like I’m in a line at the DMV anymore; “oh you need that, go stand in that line and learn that stack, then come back”.

Like you, I’m extremely skeptical about the multiplatform siren. We tried it in Smalltalk land. The Java guys tried it and failed. I tried Flutter for a couple of apps, early testing iOS users were totally turned off (so fine for internal simple utility apps only). I would love it if someone really succeeded. We have 2 Swift UIKit apps I’ll have to convert to SwiftUI someday. So I will wish all that try well, but I’m not holding my breath at all.

Having a “write once run everywhere” pitch is about the same as politicians who run on “change”. It always sells; it never really delivers.

The first two paragraphs has been my experience on Android too. Android Framework is an incredibly disjointed mess that leaves you neck-deep in half-baked APIs.

Compose is better for sure. I’m still figuring it all out but it’s a marked improvement.

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