Compose Multiplatform and Jetpack Compose

Edit pageLast modified: 13 January 2025

Compose Multiplatform is a cross-platform UI toolkit developed by JetBrains. It extends Google's Jetpack Compose toolkit for Android by supporting additional platforms.

Compose Multiplatform makes compose APIs available from common Kotlin code, allowing you to write shared compose UI code that can run on Android, iOS, desktop, and web.

As Compose Multiplatform is based on Jetpack Compose, using these frameworks is a very similar experience. Both are powered by the Compose compiler and runtime. They use the same core concepts and the same APIs for building UI, including @Composable functions, state handling APIs like remember, UI components such as Row and Column, modifiers, animation APIs, and so on. This means that you can reuse existing knowledge of Jetpack Compose in Compose Multiplatform, and you can learn from almost any Jetpack Compose material, including Google's official documentation.

Naturally, Compose Multiplatform has platform-specific features and considerations:

  • The Android-only components page lists APIs that are closely tied to the Android platform and are therefore not available from common Compose Multiplatform code.

  • Some platform-specific APIs, such as window handling APIs for desktop or the UIKit compatibility APIs for iOS, are only available on their respective platforms.

Here's an overview of the availability of popular components and APIs: