Cross-Platform Development in 2025: Flutter vs. Kotlin Multiplatform

• By Grace Taylor
• 11-08-2025
• Mobile App Development

Introduction

With the increasing demand for rapid development cycles, smooth UX across devices, and reducing costs, cross-platform development is a necessity. In 2025, business owners are prioritizing frameworks that help them deploy on Android, iOS, web, and the desktop using a single codebase. In the middle of such demand, Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform are two leading platforms.

This article is all about how each framework progresses, their comparison in real-life cases, and what developers and business owners should choose in 2025 for efficient results in cross-platform web and mobile development.

Understanding Cross-Platform Development

Helping businesses in the creation of high-quality applications, cross-platform development has been a base of modern mobile app development. It helps the smooth running of applications on platforms like iOS, Android, desktop, and web. Utilization of cross-platform frameworks helps companies reach a wider audience through a single codebase.

Why choose Cross-Platform?

Choosing a cross-platform reduces developers’ time and efforts, and optimizes the app development process. Moreover, it helps in the enhancement of maintenance and sharing of the code. As a result, it is easier for the developers to update and scale apps from time to time.

As startups and enterprises prefer unified and scalable frameworks, developers are building more and more mobile apps using cross-platform technologies because of:

• Reduced costs: Cost efficiency and reduction in maintenance costs
• Consistent UI/UX: Smooth user experience across all platforms
• Quick market deployment: Once built, deploy anywhere
• Productivity of a developer: knowledge sharing with fewer switches

Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform: An Overview

Cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform have changed the way developers view the development process. These frameworks offer reliable solutions to develop native apps across multiple platforms. Through this cross-platform development, business owners can

• Improve development cycles
• Cut costs
• Ensure consistent UX across all devices

This strategy facilitates developers in resource maximization and delivering applications that are rich in features. As a result, they market applications faster, attracting companies in search of expansion of their digital presence.

Here is a quick overview of features for Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform

Evolution of Flutter

Being an open-source framework for developing cross-platform apps, Flutter offers a complete kit for software development. The kit is used to develop desktop, web, and mobile applications from a single codebase.

Flutter is a famous choice of developers due to prebuilt widgets to create high-performing UI, increasing the speed of the application development process. Some of the top companies like BMW, Google Ads, Alibaba, and Google Pay use Flutter to develop their apps.

Flutter in 2025

In 2025, Flutter has evolved into a more comprehensive multi-platform framework. Now, it is more mature, expanded, and polished with the following key updates:

• Flutter 4.0 comes with major improvements in web and desktop support.
• Replacing Skia, Impeller Engine makes smoother animations, reducing jank.
• Integrates smoothly with edge computing and AI-powered assistants.

Advantages of Flutter

• Strong ecosystem: Frequent community updates with thousands of plugins.
• Desktop and web parity: Web apps support SEO readiness and full responsiveness.
• Hot reload: Comes with quick testing and release.
• Perfect user experience: Uses the engine to render UI and makes it highly consistent for all platforms

Shortcomings to Consider

• Larger app size than native counterparts
• Learning curve: Extra time required to ramp up due to lack of widespread familiarity with Kotlin and JavaScript
• Performance cost: Complexity in memory-heavy operations or animations due to the UI rendering layer.

Best Use Cases

Flutter works best in scenarios where design consistency, UI complexity, and speed matter. It especially shines for consumer apps, rapid MVP development, and brand-aligned experiences.

Consumer Apps with Complex UIs

Flutter becomes the ideal choice for consumer-facing apps that require visually interactive and rich interfaces. Its unique ability to render engine enables it to develop applications with beautifully animated interfaces that feel smooth on all devices.

Reflectly, a sleek AI journaling application, is the perfect example. Reflectly has an outstanding UI and transitions, all because of Flutter.

Rapid MVP Development and Prototyping

For teams and startups that are looking for quick idea validation, Flutter has rapid development features. These features include a large library of prebuilt widgets and hot reload. Such features help in reducing time-to-market.

Developed by the team of the Broadway musical, Hamilton: The Official App is the perfect example. This app was developed in only three months. It was launched on both Android and iOS, which is a reflection of Flutter’s flexibility and speed.

Apps Demanding the Same Look Across Platforms

In cases where it is crucial to keep brand consistency across Android, iOS, desktop, and web, Flutter is an excellent choice. Flutter makes sure it delivers accurate designs for each platform as it renders its UI through the Skia engine.

Developed using Flutter, Google Ads delivers a uniform and smooth experience across web and mobile. As a result, campaign management becomes easier for the marketers without any platform-specific limitations.

Kotlin Multiplatform’s Power

Replacing Java for the development of Android apps, Kotlin Multiplatform is a general-purpose programming language. It was originally built to fix common issues linked with Java to develop Android apps. Some of these issues were null pointer errors and the verbosity of the code.

Other than mobile app development, Kotlin is used for the development of backend frameworks and server-side programming. For this reason, Kotlin now has better productivity with:

• Modern features
• More expressive and concise syntax
• Better development tools

Just like Google, my companies now prefer Flutter for developing Android apps using Java Virtual Machine. Uber, Pinterest, Trello, and Kickstarter are among the famous companies that use Kotlin for mobile app development.

Key Updates in 2025

In the year 2025, shared logic with Native Power is the key update in Kotlin Multiplatform, with the following features:

• Integration with JetBrains Compose Multiplatform enables Kotlin’s cross-platform development of UI for iOS, Android, web, and desktop to be more cohesive and smoother.
• Fully supported in Android Studio, Kotlin has major improvements and updates the enhance its performance, stability, and speed across platforms.
• Widely adopted by fintech companies, banks, and large enterprises, Kotlin is playing a critical role in the development of scalable and secure apps

Advantages of Kotlin Multiplatform

• Native performance: Responsiveness for UI
• No limitations on UI: Preserves unique abilities of Android and iOS by allowing developers to work directly with SwiftUI on both platforms.
• Flexibility in code sharing: Allows code sharing for data handling, networking, and business logic (only when it makes sense).

Potential Weaknesses

• UI duplication occurs as teams have to maintain two front-end codebases for separate UIs for each platform.
• Smaller community with fewer plugins, learning materials, and open-source libraries.
• Slower prototyping involves more code when beginning from scratch.

Best Use Cases

Kotlin Multiplatform works on a not one-size-fits-all model. But it is excellent in specific scenarios of development where performance, flexibility, and business logic are important. In 2025, businesses are increasingly in favor of Kotlin Multiplatform for their projects.

Kotlin performs best for projects that demand the smooth integration of backend logic across all platforms, while delivering native-level UI experiences. The following are the scenarios where Kotlin delivers extraordinary value.

Kotlin-based Projects

Companies where Kotlin-based Android applications are developed use Kotlin Multiplatform to expand those apps. It helps them reuse the existing framework and Kotlin skills in place of introducing and training a new language or framework.

As a result, developer onboarding is reduced, the development timeline is improved, and maintenance is simplified. Careem and many fintech companies have successfully utilized Kotlin on their existing projects.

Complex Applications

Scheduling platforms, health monitoring apps, or finance applications that demand precise logic execution benefit greatly from Kotlin. Kotlin helps developers working on such apps centralize data handling and core algorithms. Not only that, they can deliver native experiences on all platforms alike.

Such practices ensure business logic performance is similar on Android and iOS, minimizing efforts and time to avoid logic duplication. Netflix, a big name in the entertainment industry, has utilized Kotlin Multiplatform to create uniformity in business logic. This way, the application performs consistently across all devices.

High-performance enterprise apps with native UX

Developers use Kotlin for enterprise-level apps with sensitive data or large user bases. Such apps demand high performance and a consistent UX across all platforms, which Kotlin makes possible.

Using SwiftUI for iOS and Jetpack for Android, Kotlin helps developers write performance-critical code to develop UI natively. It also helps them share core functionalities like business rules, authentication, and API handling.

All this makes an app native and helps developers scale it efficiently. Philips and VMware are among the companies that have adopted Kotlin for the development and maintenance of their enterprise-level applications across desktop and mobile. In benchmark tests by Nextbridge engineers, Kotlin Multiplatform showed 22?tter native performance for finance apps.

A Technical Comparison

Developer Experience and Community Support

Flutter

• Over 2 million global developers: Due to its ease of use, visual consistency, and cross-platform abilities, it is widely accepted by developers worldwide. It reflects faster problem-solving, a healthy ecosystem, and a huge bulk of learning tools.
• A huge library on pub.dev: Flutter holds a strong position due to a huge package on pub.dev. Using thousands of libraries and plugins, developers can merge complex systems with minimum costs.
• Strong communities on Discord, Reddit, and YouTube: These platforms have Flutter communities where users make the most of Flutter for different purposes that each platform serves. Discord for real-time discussion, Reddit for community insights, and YouTube for live sessions and tutorials. These platforms promote learning and fast problem-solving.

Kotlin Multiplatform

• Created by JetBrains: JetBrains not only actively supports and evolves Kotlin but also ensures its long-term stability. Many companies with an Android-first approach are utilizing Kotlin for their codebase across all platforms.
• Famous among the GitHub Community: The GitHub community is smaller but growing quickly, where contributors are actively sharing tools, libraries, and solutions related to Kotlin.
• Contributions by enterprises and academia: Kotlin attracts the attention and interest of both enterprise teams and researchers alike, with a focus on maintainability and scalability. As a result, more structured and productive development standards are set.

Which One is Right for You?

Deciding and choosing between Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform depends on the scenarios. The following table will help you decide which to choose:

Future Potential: Beyond 2025

Flutter will be coming with reduced app size, better SEO optimization, and stronger integration for native apps.
Kotlin Multiplatform will see reduced gaps and full-fledged UI support.

Conclusion

The year 2025 is more accessible, sophisticated, and versatile in terms of cross-platform application development. Flutter wins in terms of speed, UI consistency, and ease, while Kotlin Platform dominates in native performance and enterprise logic sharing. Both are constantly evolving and improving to serve different purposes.