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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why not Kotlin Multiplatform. I’ve been using LLMs to build with KMP for about 10 months and it’s a delight and you can use native Swift UI when you want to. It seems to be the best of all worlds.

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Not enough community around it. Shopify would have to pioneer a lot more than they would like to get it working for their use case.

I've been out of the app world for ages, always liked kotlin. Can you speak more about multiplatform?

Well the thing is that the server code is basically Java, and the only bad thing about Java is writing it but since I don’t have to write it, it’s actually a really solid option. Then you have shared UI (don’t use WASM for web though it’s terrible, I use React for the web frontend) but you can switch to some or all native components when you need to on any platform. So for example I needed native components for secure storage and passkeys and did that by mixing in some swift on iOS and using a JNI native bridge on macOS and Windows.

I created a standardised bootstrap for all our projects here starting from the KMP wizard:

https://bitbucket.org/workingsoftware/kmpbootstrap/src/main/

The reason it the bootstrap has all platforms included is that adding in iOS, android and desktop after you have already created the project is a bit of a hassle compared with just always having the same structure even if you only want to use web.

Then you can easily add on native apps later if you like.

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