Touchlab Blog

Lottie and Bodymovin provide amazing animations that you can now use in your Compose Multiplatform projects.

Calling Kotlin Multiplatform from Swift can be a painful experience. Kotlin engineers new to KMP rarely understand the issues. The "Bad Swift Simulation" helps Kotlin engineers "feel the pain" by replicating the experience directly in Kotlin. With that experience, understanding how to fix the situation, and why you need to, is much simpler.

Virtually all native mobile teams evaluating KMP start with a library publishing model. KMP module libraries are written, versioned, and "consumed" by the apps. The classic approach is to build and publish binary dependencies. In 2024, with KMP at stable and gaining significant traction, we no longer recommend this approach. It makes an inherently imbalanced iOS developer experience worse. Share Kotlin source instead.

KMP for native mobile is mature technology. Best practice guidance for how teams should apply it is not. KMP has amazing potential, but presents unique workflow and management problems. Understanding these problems, and having a plan, is critical.

Huge improvement to Kotlin Multiplatform debugging in Xcode.

For teams scaling KMP, versioned libraries are inefficient. Merging app code and KMP code into a single repo may be impractical, and introduces its own issues. GitPortal allows bidirectional, eventual code sharing.

Do you actually need to use SPM or Cocoapods to include KMP? You don't, and it might not be the right answer

Understanding how Gradle properties work can save you a lot of time debugging. This post explains how to set properties and what their priorities are.

For teams piloting KMP, direct access to the Kotlin source is the best way to get started. Use GitPortal to link and sync KMP source from an external repo. In Part 1, we'll install GitPortal, set up the three source code repos, and configure CI to monitor everything.

To maximize your iOS developer experience with KMP, you'll want to install the best tools available and configure them appropriately. There are many options available, but this is Touchlab's preferred iOS development setup.