I Came Back to Kotlin for KMP — Here’s What Broke First

Part 1 — Why KMP, Why Now, and the First Walls I've been building mobile apps since 2011. Java with Eclipse, back when ADT was the only game in town and a simple ListView took half a day to get right. Then Kotlin came along and everything got better. Then Flutter came along and I spent the last three years living in Dart land — and honestly, it was great. But something kept pulling me back. Late last week I decided to come back to Kotlin. Not for a side project or a tutorial — for something real. I collaborate with a music magazine that had just updated their WordPress backend and refreshed their theme. A working REST API, fresh content, a product I actually care about. It was the perfect excuse to dive into Kotlin Multiplatform. I'd been watching KMP from a distance for years. It always seemed almost ready. Then in late 2023 it went stable, the tooling caught up, and the library ecosystem started filling in. The timing finally felt right. This is the first post in a series documenting