Developing across platforms
One of the biggest advantages of a cross-platform framework is that you generate your apps from one code base. This allows you to reuse code and assets (such as images and text). In the previous section, Building a cross-platform app, you learned about the project structure of Compose Multiplatform and how you can share a composable function across Android and the desktop. I explained the relationship between the four main modules androidApp
, iosApp
, desktopApp
, and shared
, and introduced a concept called source sets, which help structure your shared code.
So far, we have focused on reusing code. But how about other resources? Usually, apps contain a lot of text that is shown to the user. What’s more, this text is often available in different languages. Consequently, changing, adding, or deleting text should apply to all platforms. To put it another way, we don’t want copies of text in androidApp
and desktopApp
. But how do we do that?