JetBrains is abandoning its plan to build an IDE for Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) on Fleet, its next-generation IDE, in favour of improved KMP features for its mature IntelliJ IDE, causing developers to question the future of Fleet itself.

Hadi Hariri, JetBrains VP of program management, said that the company intended two years ago to create a standalone IDE for KMP based on Fleet, but that feedback from customers demanded KMP support for IntelliJ, the IDE platform used for IDEA, Google’s Android Studio, and other IDEs such as PHPStorm, RubyMine and Rider. Android Studio is built on the free community edition of IntelliJ IDEA.

Hariri further said that support for KMP in Fleet is being deprecated altogether in the next three months, and there are no longer any plans for a dedicated KMP IDE.

“This makes me worried for Fleet’s future,” said a developer commenting on Hariri’s post.

On the other hand, KMP developers were generally positive about the news. “You listened to the community … whatever Fleet’s future may be … it doesn’t have the near-term readiness to support KMP, that’s already been demonstrated by the IntellJ platform.”

KMP, which targets iOS, Android, web and desktop platforms, received a boost at Google’s I/O event in May 2024, when Google gave KMP official support. It makes sense that Google would prefer to see KMP supported in Android Studio, rather than using a different IDE.

Fleet was introduced in late 2021 and has been in preview ever since, with features including strong collaboration and remote development support and a minimalist UI that is reminiscent of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Since then, Fleet has been much improved, and is now at preview 1.45, released last month. A new “islands” UI was added late last year, visually separating the editor and tool panels to make Fleet more modular, visually scalable, and less distracting.

Adoption of Fleet though has been limited, not least because it remains in preview, but also suggesting that developers have little enthusiasm for an entirely new editor or IDE. JetBrains has also taken steps to make the IntelliJ IDE platform cleaner and less distracting, introducing a controversial new UI that some developers regard as moving it closer to the look and feel of VS Code.

Maintaining two separate IDE families is expensive and when Fleet was first announced, it seemed possible that it might one day be the primary JetBrains IDE platform. Today that looks unlikely. A developer on Hacker News claimed to have “talked to a Jetbrains representative at a conference about this. They said Fleet was/is an experiment in the realtime collaboration tech, which really bloomed during Covid. They said it is no longer seen as a good direction internally, so not to expect much.”