KMP vs. Flutter - Who Will Win The Cross-Platform Battle?

In this video I'll compare the two most viable cross-platform technologies for mobile developers in 2024.

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00:00 Introduction
01:37 Code Sharing
02:34 Compilation
04:36 UI Rendering
06:13 How To Communicate With Native APIs
08:55 Performance
10:06 Maturity
11:53 Future
14:10 Personal Recommendation

[Niyaziu]

I'm taking the risk and investing in Kotlin and KMP for my career as I'm about to graduate. At worst I think I can transition to native Android. Wish me luck guys.

[stijndcl]

A big pro for KMP is that if you ever change your mind and want to go native again, you only have to re-write the iOS app cause the Android one is already native. If you do that with Flutter you have to write two new apps from the ground up.

[mahmoudalkateb]

Im working with flutter,
CMP has a potential tbh, i love the structure of composables comparing to flutter widget its more readable and flexible, can't wait to transition to KMP 🤩

[DeceptiveRealities]

I've been using Jetpack Compose MP in a real iOS product and can't say I've seen any real problems or showstoppers. The only annoying thing is how many parts have to be marked as Experimental at the present time.

[saqibshafin]

9:37 Flutter does not run in DartVM in Production/Release builds, they are AOT compiled in Production builds, meaning, they don't need VMs to run. Meaning, performance is near-native, if not native.

They use VM in debug/development mode though.

[xybnedasdd]

Please, for the love of god: do *NOT* assume performance differences without providing real-world benchmarks. For example, JVM-targeted Kotlin is oftentimes faster than Kotlin Native. Also: Flutter does *NOT* use DartVM for production apps, only for debug apps.

[helmutbierbaumer]

Congrats
Your videos are constantly getting better and better.
Clearly the number one source for Android on Youtube!

[tarapogancev]

Great video! I work with both Jetpack Compose and Flutter, almost 50/50, and have to say I really enjoy Kotlin as a language much more than Dart. UI in Jetpack Compose is also much cleaner, but you eventually get used to Flutter's way as well. For now, I'd still go to Flutter when it comes to cross-platform apps. I feel comfortable with its large community of pub packages, and a wide span of learning resources, but I'm sure that I'll be learning KMP in the near future one it gets more support and a stronger base. This is a great start! 😄

[gerdsfargen]

Philipp, do you have a video that shows a roadmap to go from the old system of Java Android dev to full blown Kotlin and adopting clean architecture with KMP and Compose?

[mahiainti]

3:53 I would note that Kotlin-to-Wasm is also a compilation target, although it's still in alpha. One great thing about it is that it allows to use the same Compose UI for web apps (while you cannot use Compose with Kotlin-JS)

[bennguyen]

Is Flutter suitable for making applications that access hardware attached to a PC? Either as a browser/web-app, or as a standalone pc executable?

For example, if the hardware connects via usb or pci (and can be accessed via a 32-bit or 64-bit DLL), how easily (or well documented) would it be for Flutter to call those dll functions? Platform Channels / FFI?

[xD-saleem]

Your channel blew up. I remember your first video! Good to see you again bro.

[leonelp]

Really cool video Philip !
in my opinion KMP/CMP will take over with time (in the short time, Flutter will definetly not disappear tho) because not only you will have all your androd native devs avaible initially on the market, but also its gonna be very easy to make ur already existing native Android app to be Cross-platform.
And with CMP it seems that its gonna be the "Quick" way to do an MVP (kinda like Flutter or RN) where after your MVP has been succesful you can just easily make the UI native in each platform if you want.

i mean i dont see any Cons tbh

[ccoding]

Flutter apps run in VM only on emulators but while running on physical devices no VM is created.

[henrik]

How to setup a kMM project on arch? ☠️

[rithikrithik]

there is no tutorial about Pre-registration in google play console make a video step by step plz many small scale developer are not knowing about Pre-registration.

[FahadAyaz]

For Compose Multiplatform, it's pretty annoying that we don't have a @Preview that we can use in common code yet. At least not in Android Studio. They do in Fleet but it didn't seem to work for me, not sure why

[GeminiVS]

is there any posible chance that KMP will support HarmonyOs in the future? the HarmonyOs seem to support Kotlin and few more android language.

[MichaelMossmanNZ]

Thank you Philipp for another great vid! ... 2:30 not a lot of syntactical sugar ... I love it =)

[lynx]

I think writing libraries for multiple platforms will be very sweet in KMP. It would be nice to use Compose multiplatform for Android and expand the UI to other platforms when those platforms become stable.