Photo by Matthew Henry

Kotlin Multiplatform Navigation. Which is the best library in 2024: Voyager, Decompose, Appyx or Precompose? — PART 1

So, finally after some time I’ve come to explore the stable version of Kotlin Multiplatform (KM) and to increase the difficulty of the task I have decided to use also Compose Multiplatform to have a shared UI.

For the reader’s information, I have not developed previously market apps with Kotlin Multiplatform nor have I used Compose for UI 😬, so the challenge is real. Adding to that, I wanted to try the new IDE by JetBrains named Fleet, which is in preview by the date of publication of this article.

The idea is to make a simple app with tabbed nested navigation. And we’ll explore the following four libraries for Kotlin Multiplatform: Voyager, Decompose, Appyx or Precompose. Why these four? Because they are recommended in the official documentation since the framework doesn’t have yet it’s own navigation solution.

For the analysis of the library we’ll consider the following factors:

• Ease of use: how much does it take to understand the library, and have everything set-up.
• Code independency: how much of our code should depend on this library so that we’re able to use it. This helps us determine the dificulty of changing the navigation library.