Book Image

Simplifying Application Development with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile

By : Róbert Nagy
Book Image

Simplifying Application Development with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile

By: Róbert Nagy

Overview of this book

Sharing code between platforms can help developers gain a competitive edge, and Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) offers a sensible way to do it. KMM helps mobile teams share code between Android and iOS in a flexible way, leaving room for native development. The book begins by helping you to gain a clear understanding of the Kotlin Multiplatform approach, how it works, and how it is different from cross-platform technologies, such as React Native and Flutter, and code sharing options, such as C++. You'll then see how your team can use this software development kit (SDK) to build native applications more effectively by learning timeless concepts and working through practical examples. As you advance, you'll get to grips with the core concepts, understand why UI sharing fails, and get hands-on with developing a small KMM application. Finally, you'll discover expert tips and best practices, along with production- and adoption-related questions, that will help you take the next step in your project and career. By the end of this Kotlin book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of the capabilities of KMM and be able to share code between Android and iOS flexibly.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1 - Getting Started with Multiplatform Mobile Development Using Kotlin
5
Section 2 - Code Sharing between Android and iOS
10
Section 3 - Supercharging Yourself for the Next Steps

Setting up the iOS app

The heavy lifting is done for us by the Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) plugin we discussed in Chapter 4, Introducing the KMM Learning Project.

If you open the iosApp.xcodeproj file in the iosApp module with Xcode and open the Build Phases tab for the iosApp target, under the Run Script phase, you should be able to see the following command:

./gradlew :shared:embedAndSignAppleFrameworkForXcode 

This is an integrational task that, as the name suggests, embeds and signs a generated Apple framework from the shared code. This task is visible only from Xcode and can't be used from the command-line interface (CLI). The task is illustrated in the following screenshot and you can read more about it at https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2021/07/multiplatform-gradle-plugin-improved-for-connecting-kmm-modules/:

Figure 7.1 – embedAndSignAppleFrameworkForXcode build phase in Xcode

After you delete the Greeting from the ContentView...