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As someone who has just released a SwiftUI app across three platforms, this tweet from Steve Troughton-Smith perfectly sums up today’s reality vs the promise of this technology.

It’s so much better than when it debuted in 2019, and yet we’re still probably three to five years away from the point where “Should I use UIKit/AppKit or SwiftUI?” won’t be the first question people ask when starting a project.

The scope of the Dev Jobs app is tiny. It’s a split view with a list on the left-hand side and a web view on the right-hand side. It’s so limited in scope that I had genuine doubts about whether it’d get through App Review on the “Apps must have significant functionality” requirement. I’m happy to say it got through without even a discussion in that area, and I do believe it stands up as being a worthwhile app, but the fact that I considered whether it’d get hit for that should prove the scope of what we made.

Yet even for something so simple, you’d probably be a little bit horrified if you looked at the code. It’s littered with so many #if os(macOS) and #availability checks. It also needs Introspect to get at underlying UIKit components in a few places.

But that’s not the worst of it. As Steve said in his tweet, the output is also inconsistent. Buttons have correct sizes and padding in some places and not in others. Positioning varies by platform and container hierarchy, and that’s often where the #if magic starts. There are also real problems when moving from iOS 14/Big Sur to 15/Monterey too. Some things get better, and some get worse, resulting in more conditional logic. It can be quite a mess. We also let many of the issues slide, only fixing the most egregious ones. That’s partly due to the limited time we had available and partly because I believe the issues will get resolved, and any hacks to make it better are likely to make things worse later. The code would be much worse if we worked around all the issues.

But there’s another side to this. Two of us built the app across three platforms from “New Project” to “Submit for Review” in ten days. I think that’s quite remarkable, and there’s zero chance that would have happened if it had been a UIKit/AppKit app. We could have shipped a UIKit app in ten days or an AppKit app in ten days, but not both. SwiftUI made that feasible.

I believe in the promise of SwiftUI. If/when it’s at the point where it can truly replace the existing UI frameworks, we will be in a better place. There won’t be fourteen different toolbar designs in fourteen iOS apps. We’ll only have toolbars that follow platform conventions. I believe we’ll end the journey in a better place, but it’s worth remembering that even though SwiftUI is almost all everyone talks and writes about, it’s still very much bleeding edge.

Dave Verwer  

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Senior iOS Engineer @ Marshmallow – Marshmallow is building a world where insurance benefits everyone. We’re looking for iOS Engineers to join our mobile team at Marshmallow to help us rebuild insurance – for good! You'll have the opportunity to help shape the roadmap, impacting both what we build and how we build it 🚀 – Remote (within European timezones) with some on-site work (United Kingdom)

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