How do you use Swift and Kotlin for iOS and Android development?

1 Swift Basics

Swift is a modern, fast, and expressive language that was designed by Apple to replace Objective-C for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS development. Swift has a concise and clean syntax, powerful features like optionals, generics, and protocols, and native support for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks. You can use Swift to create any kind of app, from games to productivity tools, and leverage the rich set of libraries and tools provided by Apple.

2 Kotlin Basics

Kotlin is a pragmatic, concise, and interoperable language that was created by JetBrains and adopted by Google as the preferred language for Android development. Kotlin runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and can interoperate with Java code, but also offers many improvements, such as null safety, coroutines, extension functions, and data classes. You can use Kotlin to create any kind of Android app, from social media to e-commerce, and benefit from the Android Studio IDE and the Android Jetpack components.

4 Creating a Cross-Platform App

One of the challenges of using Swift and Kotlin for iOS and Android development is to create a cross-platform app that works consistently and efficiently on both operating systems. There are different approaches to achieve this goal, such as using a hybrid framework (like React Native or Flutter), a native framework (like Xamarin or NativeScript), or a multiplatform framework (like Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile or Swift UI). In this article, we will focus on the last option, which allows you to share some common logic and UI code between Swift and Kotlin, while still using the native features and frameworks of each platform.

5 Sharing Common Logic

To share some common logic between Swift and Kotlin, you can use a multiplatform framework that allows you to write code once and compile it for different targets. For example, you can use Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM), which is a plugin for Android Studio that lets you create a shared module with Kotlin code that can be used by both iOS and Android apps. You can use KMM to write common business logic, data models, network requests, and database operations, and then access them from your native Swift or Kotlin code. You can also use KMM to write common tests that can run on both platforms.