The Case for Kotlin: Risk-Free, Cross-Platform, Future-Friendly… and Ready to Work – Right Now

It’s madness, really.

An app is written for the Web.

Then, it’s written for Android.

Same app, different code.

Oh, and it needs be written for iOS, too. At the same time.

Again, different code. The question is, “Why?”

Development teams are essentially tripling their coding and testing efforts to ensure cross-platform coverage. It’s costly. It’s time-consuming. And – this might be the craziest part – it’s uncertain what the shelf life of the code will be. As we know, the future is unwritten.

As always, the goal is to be able to implement products more efficiently, and with better testing across platforms. And up to now, every cross-platform coding solution that has come along really hasn’t worked that well.

The good news is that there is now a better way. And a proven way.

We at Touchlab have been writing code in Kotlin and deploying it to Android and iOS platforms, with no hiccups.

That’s why we’ve gone all-in with Kotlin.

Kotlin is a true multiplatform language

Kotlin enables you to write once, and test once. No siloed development teams. The same code can be used across Android, iOS and Web apps with no changes, eliminating the need for a translation layer. In essence, you’re reducing the amount of business logic coded by frontend developers by consolidating it efficiently with native code, but not oversimplifying abstractions.

What’s not to love about that?

No wonder there’s a groundswell of enthusiastic support in developer communities around the world. There are 1.5 million developers currently using Kotlin, with 96,000 GitHub repositories containing 100 million lines of code. And the numbers keep growing. It’s one of the top two languages that developers are hungry to learn.

Kotlin was developed as a completely new language eight years ago, built from the ground up as a pragmatic approach to coding – a way to develop cleanly, clearly, and quickly. Simply put, Kotlin is more readable, reusable, interoperable, and safer, offering a first-rate developer experience.

Kotlin is your best bet on your complete tech stack

More important, it’s a low-risk way to code because it dovetails seamlessly with the native platforms on Java, iOS, and the web. It’s a modern language that enables you to build on what you’ve already coded, without re-working or re-inventing what you already have. Plus, because the code you share is optional, you can start small and increment as desired.

Kotlin is really an extension of Java, so it’s not a big leap for Java developers to start using Kotlin at all.  In other words, you don’t have to make a big, potentially expensive decision to get started.

In fact, on Android, Kotlin was built for direct JVM interoperability. On iOS, Kotlin is ready for prime time, and the first half of 2019 will see rapid mainstream adoption. And Google officially recommends Kotlin as a language of choice.

The big considerations for any development team are cost, time, resources, and risk. And the big problem with the siloed approach is that organizations are often tripling them.

At the same time, the wrong teams are working on the wrong projects. Back-end developers should focus on architecture as well as APIs – but not UI. Enabling your back-end developers to code and test the client and server features as a unified whole enables more rapid development with safer, higher quality and identical implementation.

Our experience with Kotlin so far?

No siloed teams. More streamlined workflows. Real cross-platform functionality.

Yes, it’s working now!