SwiftUI After 7 Years: A Story of Mediocrity

The problem with complex systems is that you can be dead long before you realize you're dead. Things can continue to seem "pretty good" for a long time just from the inertia of past good decisions and built-up infrastructure. You see some fraying or cracks but everything looks fundamentally sound, until it isn't.

Apple's inability to deploy a new UI framework that's better than the previous one is troubling. This is the company that shifted from Toolbox to Carbon to Cocoa and each step was better than the last. Could Apple build MacOS X and Cocoa today if they didn't already exist? Microsoft's two decades of failure to ship a true successor to Win32 suggests that Microsoft (at least, the operating system side of the company) died a long time ago. I wonder if we'll say the same thing about Apple 10 years hence.

I'm sure many will disagree, but I have doubts that pure declarative-reactive is the "right" shape for an all-purpose native UI framework. In my experience, Kotlin+Compose shares many of the same warts… its main redeeming quality is that it's better than Android Framework (most of the time), which is low bar to clear.

These frameworks have a number of good ideas but they don't necessarily combine in a way that transcends high quality traditional imperative frameworks with declarative-reactive bits sprinkled throughout, at least for more complex apps. SwiftUI and its ilk work best for super simple tabs-and-flat-lists sorts of apps.

> real, production-grade UI framework

What does this even mean? There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store that are 100% SwiftUI. They are real. And they are very much "production grade".

The only people still complaining about SwiftUI 7 years later are the UIKit holdouts that never took the time to properly learn how to use it.

SwiftUI it is the type of framework that makes the easy things easier to accomplish but the harder things harder.

It is a newbie trap. It is great at producing simple apps, or things that don't require intense scrolling, or anything with heavy animations and precise layouts, but when you do something smooth, it is not it. It feels more of a React Native competitor, than a true UIKit replacement.

Also, almost everything that Apple has re-wrote with SwiftUI, came out worse as before (Settings, Spotlight, etc), and that doesn't help.

With AI coding... SwiftUI lost its edge/advantage (easy to layout screens), as now you code less of that directly, and might as well just go fo the framework that allows the most flexibility and gives you the best results for your users.

Apple really needs to either double down on it, and make it such that it has everything that UIKit has (match both features and performance), or just turn it into another optional framework, just as Interface Builder (.xib files) back in the day of Objective-C.

Right now it heavily promotes it as a first class citizen, meanwhile the features are not even parity with UIKit. It is so misleading to newcomers to the platform.

Ps. The other upsetting thing about SwiftUI, is that it has hurt the Swift language as well, as the team has had to introduce all kinds of hacks, or obscure features to the language in order to make it work, which made even the Swift language experience worse and more complicated than it should have been.

A similar story to WPF.

I fell in love with SwiftUI the day it was announced, but as a solo dev I still haven't been able to make a full app with it yet, mostly because of the lack of documentation, and the gaps where you still need to drop down to AppKit/UIKit.

I went through Visual Basic, .NET, WPF, Cocoa, and other random frameworks all professing to be the promised panacea for UI, but I think SwiftUI+SwiftData is the best environment ever.. IF only it could reach its full potential, i.e. do everything that Apple's "legacy" APIs can do.

I even tried using SwiftUI for games: https://i.imgur.com/5aTWbft.mp4

The biggest/worst hurdle in the "modern" dev experience is Apple's insistence on a yearly update cycle and the way they advertise those updates: You have to wait for the next WWDC and suffer through videos of uncanny-valley presenters, hoping to catch a glimpse of something that fixes the shit that was bothering you since the last WWDC.

3rd-party sites like hackingwithswift.com & swiftwithmajid.com provide invaluable info that Apple's own docs should.

At least the Swift language has been getting more regular updates since it went open source.

There's no way I'd dare to take on a full Apple-platform app project alone on my own, but I've started dabbling in it again thanks to AI: Codex even converted an old app I made in Visual Basic 900 years ago and had it running in SwiftUI within minutes!

I've even tried to get AI to sift through the WWDC video transcripts so I won't have to waste my mortal lifespan on that.

Is the right way to develop mobile apps flutter? or Kotlin multiplatform plus native UIs?

SwiftUI is gold compared to SwiftData.

skills issue