Greetings from the JetBrains and Kotlin communities!

In case you missed it, we’d like to share the huge news in the mobile industry that happened in May – Android support for Kotlin Multiplatform for sharing business logic across platforms.

Android has been actively supporting Kotlin since 2017. During Google I/O 2024 in May, the company announced Google’s support for Kotlin Multiplatform on Android for sharing code across mobile, web, server, and desktop platforms. This helps boost developer productivity and aligns with Android’s Kotlin-first approach, leading to higher quality Android apps.

“Our team is thrilled with Google’s public support for Kotlin Multiplatform and our fruitful collaboration. The adoption of the technology by large, high-profile apps, such as Google Workspace, presents unique challenges for Kotlin Multiplatform and allows us to deliver the best cross-platform development experience for all of our users. And with Jetpack libraries going multiplatform, the KMP ecosystem is becoming more and more vibrant every day. We look forward to supporting the Android community, empowering developers to build high-quality apps efficiently and effectively.”

Google Workspace has been working on a large migration from a Java-oriented multiplatform foundation to Kotlin Multiplatform to take better advantage of Kotlin, its ecosystem, and the capabilities of Kotlin Multiplatform, such as native interop and runtime performance. During KotlinConf 2024, Jason Parachoniak talked about the journey of Google Workspace from Java to Kotlin Multiplatform, including key benefits, Kotlin Multiplatform’s capabilities, and performance gains.

“We've decided to transition to Kotlin Multiplatform, starting with Google Docs, which is in the process of launching and rolling out right now on Kotlin Multiplatform. We started with Google Docs because it's a very heavily annotated codebase, so we have metrics for build performance, latency, and memory usage very carefully annotated for Google Docs. We can actually see those metrics and provide feedback to the JetBrains team and make iterative improvements on that ecosystem and use that as judgment for moving forward and expanding. So like I said, Google Docs is currently in the process of rolling out to real users through Kotlin Multiplatform right now, and we're really excited about that.”

What else to watch

KotlinConf 2024 Keynote: Stories From Philips, McDonald’s Bolt, and Wrike – Global companies share their stories of leveraging Kotlin Multiplatform for cross-platform development, applying different code-sharing strategies.

The JetBrains team

The Drive to Develop