Elevator Pitch
We explore how even though Android and iOS started out so different, by driving to build the best mobile platform they produced surprising similarities.
1) Language:: Kotlin is Swift
2) UI:: Jetpack Compose is Swift(UI)
3) Design:: Material Design conforms to Apple HIG
4) Platform:: MLKit / MLCore
Description
We explore how even though Android and iOS started out so different, by driving to build the best mobile platform they produced surprising similarities.
1) Language:: Kotlin is Swift.
As Kotlin replaces Java and Swift replaces Objective-C, both platforms benefit greatly. We explore how even though these two languages were developed in complete isolation, the fact that they draw on similar concepts resulted in producing the same language features (i.e. Kotlin coroutines / Flow / Channel & Swift structured concurrency).
2) UI:: Jetpack Compose is Swift(UI).
Compose replaces XML/Java and SwiftUI replaces UIKit, we look at how both systems provide declarative syntax, modifiers, state management, navigation, animation and tools support in Android Studio / XCode.
3) Design:: Material Design conforms to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).
4) Platform:: Platforms has many of the same features including the watch (WearOS / iWatch), voice commands (“Hay Google” / “Seri”), Health (GoogleFit / HealthKit), AR (ARCore / ARKit), ML (MLKit / MLCore), car (Android Auto / CarPlay), money (Google Pay / Apple Wallet) and store (Google Play Store / Apple App Store) etc ….
By understanding the similarities we understand each unique platform better.
At the end of the talk, we will show that although today we have multiple technologies which allow us to build both mobile platforms with one code base, in the future we might not need these technologies if these two platforms keep co-evolving toward each other.
Notes
As an Android and iOS developer both platforms have many great features to offer and learning both can lead to many advantages.