The future of cross-platform is Native - Justin Mancinelli | #LeadDevNewYork

The quest for the perfect cross-platform solution has been like the quest for the Holy Grail. It’s been going on a long time, there are a myriad of perceived benefits, and every time someone claims to have found it, it’s never the right one. Many people ask, “Should I go with a cross-platform solution, or a native solution?” but the reality is the quest is bringing us closer to a solution where there isn’t a meaningful difference.

React Native wasn’t the first to show a solution could be both cross-platform and native, but it has certainly convinced a lot of people. As many of those early converts are discovering the limitations, they are beginning to fall back into either-or thinking. Maybe they just have the wrong assumptions.

Kotlin Multiplatform makes some new assumptions and, although it wasn’t the first to do so, is gaining in popularity very quickly. Is Kotlin Multiplatform the holy grail of cross-platform? Probably not. But it does bring cross-platform and native closer than ever before.

This talk will map out the quest for the perfect cross-platform solution, why we embarked, the twists and turns we’ve had along the way, and why the future of cross-platform is native.

About Justin Mancinelli
Justin has been at Touchlab for 3 years helping dev and product teams internally and externally navigate the waters of mobile app development and integrating them into larger technical, customer, and business ecosystems. He started programming BASIC and Assembly on a TI-86 calculator in middle school and eventually explored the world, becoming a senior developer and agile team lead along the way. Most of his commuting time is spent reading blogs and sharing choice quotes on Twitter. Most of his personal time is spent with his wife and toddler exploring Queens.

Lead Dev is a community for technical leaders. We have a series of conferences and meetups designed with the needs and pain points of technical team leads in mind. We programme each conference around our three key themes of Team, Tech & Tools. The talks are designed to help very practically with common problems in these areas. To find out more about us, visit:

[yannneq]

Kotlin multiplatform is promising, but when comparing stacks, these key factors rarely get mentioned:
1) does it allow for a shared end to end testing and continuous integration setup between platforms?
2) does it have feature parity by design?
3) can code be shared between web and mobile?
4) availability of experienced developers?
5) shared pull requests between ios, android, and web (and thus converging knowledge and coding standards)?

Kotlin MP will likely never check these boxes, which people should be aware of before deciding. E.g. React Native is quite powerful when looking at the overall benefits and teams like shopify seem to agree.