If you’ve been living under a rock for a year, I have shocking news about the election*, and great news about the future of Swift portability.
Swift for Android is here.
More specifically, a quite early-days developer preview is here.
This tool is in its infancy, but formalises over a decade of homegrown toolchain hacks used by cross-platform wonks to enable Android to talk to Swift code.
As it happens, I’ve got a touch of experience using Kotlin Multiplatform, a.k.a. KMP. It’s always been the most palatable cross-platform solution for native mobile devs, since it works by sharing business logic in a cross-platform module, but allowing for fully native iOS and Android UI code.
I figured, let’s get ahead of the debate/war your iOS and Android teams are inevitably going to have and compare the developer experience of both cross-platform tools.
Now that I have nothing better to do with my time, I spent the week playing with Swift for Android, and KMP, setting up a pair of cross-platform apps based on Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. Swift for Android powers the Android app (with Jetpack Compose), and KMP powers the iOS app (with SwiftUI).
Here’s what I learned.
*I didn’t say which election, please project your biases favourably
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