An In‑Depth Overview of Skip: A High‑Performance Native Cross‑Platform Development Framework

Skip is a new high‑performance native cross‑platform development framework released by Glimpse I/O in 2023, which converts Swift/SwiftUI code into Kotlin/Jetpack Compose to enable efficient Android and iOS development.

Its architecture follows a “native‑first” principle, using the platform’s native UI components (Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI) without a custom rendering engine, and provides a modular design, state‑management, and a full toolchain for code generation, debugging, and building.

Developers set up the environment by installing Kotlin and Swift, adding the Skip CLI via Homebrew, initializing a project with skip init MyApp , writing shared business logic in the shared directory, and implementing UI separately on each platform.

class MyApp {
    fun greet(): String {
        return "Hello, Skip!"
    }
}

Example SwiftUI shared code and its Kotlin/Compose counterpart are shown, illustrating how Skip translates SwiftUI views into composable functions.

public struct RootView: View {
    public init() {}
    public var body: some View {
        ContentView()
            .task {
                logger.log("Welcome to Skip on \(androidSDK != nil ? \"Android\" : \"Darwin\")!")
            }
    }
}

open class MainActivity: AppCompatActivity {
    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: android.os.Bundle?) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
        UIApplication.launch(this)
        setContent {
            // Compose UI
        }
    }
}

The article compares Skip with Flutter, React Native, Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, highlighting its smaller binary size, superior UI rendering performance, faster startup, and lower memory usage.

Skip’s project structure consists of a Shared module, Android module, iOS module, and a Skip toolchain module, each responsible for shared logic, native UI, and code generation.

Key internal modules such as skip‑unit, skip‑lib, skip‑ui, skip‑foundation, and optional extensions (Bluetooth, Firebase, etc.) provide a comprehensive ecosystem, though the community and ecosystem are still early.

When using Skip, developers must handle platform‑specific differences, may need additional state‑management libraries for complex scenarios, and rely on standard Android Studio and Xcode debugging tools.

In summary, Skip offers a native‑first, high‑performance alternative for cross‑platform mobile development, with promising advantages in performance and code sharing, while still maturing its ecosystem.