Executive Summary

JetBrains has officially removed the editing, syntax highlighting, and navigation features for Swift from the Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) plugin, starting with IntelliJ IDEA 2026.3 and Android Studio Rabbit 2 | 2026.2.2. What's changing is only the IDE tooling for Swift — running and debugging Kotlin code on iOS continues to work normally as before.

The Problem Being Solved

According to the Kotlin team, this Swift editing feature was originally built for AppCode, JetBrains' iOS IDE that they have since discontinued, then reused for Fleet, and finally installed into the KMP plugin for working on mixed Kotlin-Swift codebases. The problem is, based on their telemetry data and user research, usage was small and kept declining — iOS developers working on KMP projects turned out to prefer using Xcode directly to write Swift, while teams based around the KMP plugin have been leaning more and more toward Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform. On the other hand, maintaining this Swift tooling is expensive because its architecture is inherited from AppCode and has to be continuously chased to stay compatible with changes in Swift, Xcode, and the IntelliJ Platform. They did consider expanding Kotlin-Swift support in this plugin, but after weighing the engineering cost against the number of users, they decided to stop.

Key Features and Code Example

What's gone: editing, syntax highlighting, and navigation within Swift files as well as across Swift-Kotlin, in the KMP plugin on IntelliJ IDEA 2026.3 and Android Studio Rabbit 2 | 2026.2.2 and above.

What still works:

  • Running iOS apps and debugging Kotlin code on iOS.
  • Kotlin/Native features like Swift Export and importing Swift packages into Kotlin projects — these are not affected at all.
  • Legacy Swift features remain in older versions of IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, and the KMP plugin, but those versions will no longer receive updates.

So in practice, if you want to keep writing and editing Swift with full IDE support, the path now goes back to Xcode, while Kotlin continues to be handled in IntelliJ IDEA/Android Studio. Kotlin/Native features like Swift Export itself are still configured via Gradle as usual, for example roughly like this (illustration, not a snippet from the article):

// build.gradle.kts — ilustrasi konfigurasi Swift Export di proyek KMP
kotlin {
    swiftExport {
        rootPackage.set("com.example.shared")
        export(project(":shared"))
    }
}

Impact and Upgrade Notes

If your team still relies on direct Swift edit/navigation features in IntelliJ IDEA or Android Studio, upgrading to IntelliJ IDEA 2026.3 or Android Studio Rabbit 2 | 2026.2.2 will remove that feature — the only way to keep it is to stay on the older IDE and KMP plugin versions, with the consequence of not receiving any further updates going forward. JetBrains has also stated outright that there are no plans to build a replacement for this feature; their focus going forward is purely on Kotlin tooling in IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, plus improving the KMP experience for iOS developers. For teams with mixed Kotlin-Swift projects, this is a fairly clear signal: prepare a workflow where Swift is handled in Xcode and Kotlin is handled in JetBrains IDEs, because that's the direction they're now optimizing for.

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First announced on the JetBrains Kotlin blog. Read the original source for full details.