I Know a Handyman

Copying the entire existing Android UI into commonMain in a single pass seemed like the fastest path forward. Instead, it immediately produced more than 10,000 compile errors spanning missing imports, deprecated libraries, and Android-only APIs. Progress became hard to measure, since every fixed error tended to surface several new ones elsewhere.

With shared business logic and UI stable, integrating native iOS dependencies became the next major blocker. Firebase setup alone took over four hours, and Swift Package Manager, the seemingly modern, natural choice, resolved dependencies cleanly but silently failed to build, with no clear error pointing to a root cause.

The team switched to CocoaPods, using Claude Code to compare configuration approaches and troubleshoot the build. Because Firebase had been mocked earlier in the migration, this integration work could be tackled in isolation, fully focused, rather than debugged alongside everything else.

The team's strength was Android, and the migration surfaced constant iOS-specific questions, platform API equivalents, lifecycle differences, and whether logic belonged in commonMain or an expect/actual split. Answering these historically meant hours in documentation, Stack Overflow, and GitHub issues.

Claude Code was brought in as an on-demand iOS pairing partner. The workflow was to build and validate each feature on Android first, then use that implementation as context to produce and understand the iOS equivalent, asking follow-up questions until the reasoning, not just the code, made sense.