JetBrains has released a preview version of Kotlin Multiplatform mobile libraries, an SDK for cross-platform mobile development for iOS and Android. Kotlin Multiplatform can be used to build apps for iOS and Android with native UI from a single shared codebase for networking, data storage, and analytics, as well as the other logic of your Android and iOS apps.

Kotlin support was added for Android in 2017 with Jetpack libraries, and expanded with Jetpack Compose. Android Jetpack is a suite of libraries for use in Android app development.

Multiplatform Mobile makes use of the multiplatform capabilities of Kotlin and provides tooling for cross-platform mobile development in Android Studio.The developers say that while Multiplatform Mobile was at the experimental stage, the Kotlin team tried various approaches to memory management, libraries, and project configuration, and they are now happy with the configuration so have released the beta.

The preview of Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile's main aim is code sharing across platforms, and the preview release is limited to two libraries - Collections and DataStore. The developers say these were chosen because they illustrate several important aspects of converting an existing library to multiplatform.

Collections is a library written in Java that has no Android-specific dependencies, but implements Java collection APIs, while DataStore is written entirely in Kotlin, and uses coroutines in both its implementation and APIs.

The libraries are available from Google’s Maven repository, and come with a number of sample projects to make it easier to get started. The sample projects includes samples created using SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose; samples with shared code for view models and navigation; and apps that have made it to the Google and Apple app stores.

Kotlin Multiplatform is available in preview now.

More Information

Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile Website 

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