One Codebase, Multiple Platforms with Compose Multiplatform

One of the big challenges in building mobile applications is that, once you've built it for one platform, you have to turn around and build it for "the other". These days, there's really only two you have to worry about, but that's still two applications you have to maintain. To make things more complicated, what if you want a matching web app, or a desktop app? Now we're up to three or four code bases, and anyone who's been around for any time at all knows the pain that lies in THAT direction.

Fortunately, we have a new option: Compose Multiplatform. In May of 2024, Google announced official support for the new framework, developed in collaboration with JetBrains, that allows developers to write Jetpack Compose applications, and then run that application, unchanged (in theory), on iOS, Android, desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux), and web.

In this session, we're going to set up a Kotlin Multiplatform application and see how to get started using Jetpack Compose to write an application. We'll integrate some libraries that I find helpful to build what should be a solid template for your own cross-platform needs.