Why Kotlin Multiplatform is a Game-Changer for Startup Teams

As India’s startup ecosystem continues to expand beyond metro hubs into fast-growing tech corridors, conversations around efficient, scalable engineering practices have become increasingly relevant. With founders under pressure to move quickly while managing lean teams, exploring pragmatic technology choices is critical. Hence, The Hans India is spotlighting emerging approaches like Kotlin Multiplatform that can influence how modern startups build and scale digital products. We have invited Roman Rastiehaiev to contribute an article to share practical insights on how this technology can help early-stage teams reduce engineering overhead, accelerate product validation, and build sustainable cross-platform architectures without compromising user experience.

For early-stage startups, the most valuable resources are time, engineering capacity, and a clear business vision. The difference between them and larger corporations is that the former usually do not have extensive budgets or specialised experts for each platform. Startups do not have long release cycles either. Hence, their survival in the harsh business world depends on the speed - the ability to ship and iterate fast - and validating product-market fit before competitors do it.

There is also a significant technical dilemma startups need to consider: whether to build multiple ecosystems from the outset. An ideal modern IT product should support Android, iOS, and desktop versions. The issue is that, as noted earlier, startups typically do not have dedicated engineers for each platform. Moreover, building products across different ecosystems requires multiple codebases and isolated workflows, further complicating the process. This results in higher costs, slower delivery, and duplicated effort for the entire product organisation.

The solution is Kotlin Multiplatform (KML), which takes a different approach to cross-platform development. Instead of requiring a single codebase for each ecosystem, it allows engineers to share only the necessary business logic. The UI layer, on the other hand, remains native.

The Startup dilemma: multiple platforms, limited resources

Startups performing cross-platform development tend to have the same challenges:

1. Duplicated effort

As outlined in the introduction, every product’s feature needs to be implemented independently on Android, iOS, and the web. This means that three platforms have three versions of business logic, data handling, testing, and networking.

2. Complex hiring requirements

Since there are different platforms, specialists in Swift for iOS, Kotlin/Java for Android, and JavaScript/TypeScript for web development are needed. Considering that startups have a limited budget, that might be unfeasible.

3. Inconsistent UX

As apps evolve, a feature released on iOS might lag on Android. Moreover, a bug fixed on one platform may remain in another. These design inconsistencies damage user trust and increase long-term maintenance debt.

4. Slow iteration

Duplication of effort significantly increase time-to-market. This can be fatal for startups where agility matters the most.

What Kotlin Multiplatform offers

KML differs from frameworks such as Flutter or React Native, as it does not aim to replace native development. Instead, the platform focuses on shared logic with native presentation, without compromising UX. Startups can, therefore, choose how much to share and how much to keep native.

There are different competitive advantages of KML from an architectural perspective. The most important are:

1. Shared business logic

Data models, storage, and domain logic can be implemented once in Kotlin and reused across different platforms.

2. Native UI flexibility

iOS developers can continue building with SwiftUI or UIKit, whereas Android specialists can use Jetpack Compose.

3. Incremental adoption

KMP can be gradually embedded into the workflow, and engineering teams can rewrite or extend only the parts that benefit from sharing.

4. Strong tooling and a mature ecosystem

KML uses JenBrains, which, in turn, provides first-class IDE support, modern language features, and compatibility with existing Android code.

Why startups should care

There are many reasons why startups should consider KML for implementation in their workflow:

1. Reduced development costs: there will be no need to hire engineers for three platforms, as one or two Kotlin specialists can handle most of the shared work. This approach helps startups save money and reduce internal communication overhead.

2. Faster time-to-market

Since features are implemented once in shared code, startups can release simultaneously across multiple platforms, run A/B tests faster, and validate new ideas without having to catch up with other teams.

3. Consistency

Shared business logic reduced discrepancies in how features behave across platforms, which provides a more predictable UX. Moreover, consistency simplifies bug fixing because engineers can fix shared code and reuse it.

4. Long-term scalability

As startups grow, maintaining a single large codebase becomes complicated. On the other hand, KML solves this problem by avoiding technical debt associated with multiple parallel implementations.

How it compares to alternatives

As noted earlier, React Native and Flutter are KML’s alternatives. Both offer fast development, but there are significant trade-offs. For instance, Flutter uses a custom rendering engine, which increases app size and can potentially cause intergeneration challenges with platform-specific components. React Native uses a JavaScript bridge, which can later introduce latency and performance issues in complex applications. Furthermore, these platforms replace the native UI stack, which might cause UX inconsistencies and technical constraints as a product grows.

KML is rather a complement to native development. Besides mentioned native UIs, engineers can also maintain native performance and tooling. Sharing only the business logic, KML’s hybrid model is more sustainable for scaling startups.

Real-world examples

KML is already supporting products from various industries. For example, Cash App, one of the most popular fintech platforms in the US, uses KMP to share business logic in Android and iOS. VMware applied it to reduce engineering overhead in enterprise-grade applications. Last but not least, Touchlab, a consulting company specialising in helping startups integrate KMP, regularly records high industry demand.

The future of Kotlin Multiplatform

Nowadays, the platform is growing into a full ecosystem for cross-platform development. The future might bring us even more advancements: a composed multiplatform with broader code sharing across UI layers, improved IDE support with IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, and an expanded library ecosystem with more open-source libraries.

Conclusion

For startups, it is crucial to build fast, spend less, and stay competitive. KML meets these needs by reducing duplication, shortening release cycles, and scaling without rewriting applications. As the article highlights, the platform can be a strategic advantage in the fast-changing business world, especially for startups.