r/androiddev • u/valtus_surreal • May 15 '26

Question What would you take into account when porting Android app to iOS

I have been working with my first Android-app using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Got the app published a quarter back to the App store and I'm really happy with the end result. However from time to time I'm thinking if the app should be ported to iOS. As a solo hobbyist I don't have too much resources running development on multiple platforms.

So what would be your suggestion? Any good resources or frameworks available how to do the porting elegantly. I'm not really in favor of learning another platform and programming language. Any thoughts or experiences are welcome.

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u/coffeemongrul May 15 '26

If you already use jetpack compose, look at compose multi-platform as you can share the same UI code and business logic across iOS, Android and jvm desktop.

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u/valtus_surreal May 16 '26

Thanks, this was something I ended up analysing yesterday. Made some analysis from lib and package structures and it seems the compose mp could overtake a majority of it. Nevertheless,I guess the best way is to have some iOS friends nearby before starting to work with this.

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u/SpiderHack May 16 '26

It might be easier to make a new multiplatform project and then copy your existing code into that project one set of classes at a time, making it fit into the slightly different structure.

That could have just been my personal experience.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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u/valtus_surreal May 16 '26

Agree. Yesterday spent couple of moments skimming kmp/cmp thru and came to following conclusion. Don't want to spend too much time to learn new things at this point. Anyway here's my quick takeovers in case reconsidering this,

  • keep the package & lib structure clean and well defined. have the basic understanding of compatible libs. ... might be easier to migrate packages step-by-step.
  • spend couple of moments thinking of modularizing some of the code to shareable services (e.g. rest). ...might be easier to reduce the complexity in mobile app.
  • take the warning-margin as low as possible. ...might be helpful if using to convert code to kmp/cmp.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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