// the find
JetBrains/compose-multiplatform
Compose Multiplatform, a modern UI framework for Kotlin that makes building performant and beautiful user interfaces easy and enjoyable.
Compose Multiplatform is JetBrains' extension of Android's Jetpack Compose to desktop (JVM), iOS, and web (Wasm). It lets you write one Kotlin UI codebase that runs on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and browser. The primary audience is Kotlin developers who already know Jetpack Compose and want to stop duplicating UI code across platforms.
1. The API fidelity to Jetpack Compose on Android is genuinely good — if you know Compose, you're not learning a new paradigm, you're just adding `expect`/`actual` for platform-specific bits. 2. Desktop rendering uses Skia via Skiko with hardware acceleration, so you get real GPU-accelerated UI on the JVM without Swing's software-rendering pain. 3. The iOS interop story is practical: you can embed native UIKit views (MKMapView, camera, etc.) inside Compose, so you're not locked into a lowest-common-denominator abstraction when you need platform APIs. 4. The benchmark suite in the repo is thorough — animation, lazy lists, canvas drawing, text layout, shaders — which signals JetBrains actually measures performance rather than just claiming it.
1. Web support (Kotlin/Wasm) is still Beta as of v1.9, and Wasm binary sizes are large; loading a 'Hello World' app in the browser still feels slow compared to a React app, and browser tooling integration (devtools, SSR) is basically nonexistent. 2. iOS support requires a Mac with Xcode to build, which breaks the 'one team, any OS' promise — Windows or Linux developers cannot ship iOS from their machine. 3. The resource system (fonts, images, localization via `composeResources`) is functional but young; anything beyond basic assets quickly hits missing APIs that Android Jetpack has had for years. 4. Third-party library ecosystem is still catching up — most popular Android Compose libraries (navigation, coil image loading, etc.) have multiplatform forks that lag behind their Android originals or are maintained by single developers.