Kotlin Multiplatform in 2026: Why We Finally Deleted Our Flutter Code
Article Summary
A team just deleted thousands of Flutter files and went all-in on Kotlin Multiplatform. Here's why the physics of cross-platform development finally caught up with them.
Sivaraaj chronicles his team's migration from Flutter to Kotlin Multiplatform in 2026, focusing on enterprise apps with heavy hardware integration. This is a technical deep-dive into performance bottlenecks, architectural tradeoffs, and the evolution of cross-platform development.
Key Takeaways
- Bluetooth latency dropped from 150ms to 5ms after ditching Flutter's MethodChannel bridge
- Cold start improved 0.8s by removing 30MB of Flutter engine overhead on iOS
- Shared 85% of code vs 98% before, treating platform-specific UI as feature not bug
- Swift Export made Kotlin sealed classes compile to native Swift enums with zero friction
- Six-month incremental migration using Trojan Horse strategy, no big-bang rewrite
Critical Insight
For hardware-integrated enterprise apps, KMP's shared logic with native UI outperformed Flutter's pixel-perfect abstraction by eliminating serialization overhead and platform evolution lag.
