alt Hacker NewsSwiftUI After 7 Years
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This seems to be a popular ‘controversial’ topic. I’ve been using SwiftUI for production applications and games since 2021. I drop down UIKit, Metal, or core animation when needed. But that’s no different than when I was making games in UIKit and would drop down to core animation or glyph renderers written in C etc.
Data Flow: The author claims there’s no way to know when things update. Not only does experience help here but there are profile tools that tell you when and where things are updated. This isn’t black magic. Keep Views small, be careful how you hand around data. @environment is super cool but can have a cascade effect. This was greatly improved iOS 17+ and I wouldn’t support anything older than iOS 17.
GeometryReader: Occasionally I’ll use this. It’s kind of a necessary evil when dealing with certain view complexity. It can also be a sign that you’re doing something wrong.
API Stability and performance: Apple users upgrade. There’s no reason that you should be supporting iOS 17 at this point — even iOS 18 is roughly 2%% of our user base across several apps. I’ve been using SwiftUI without major performance issues but I also don’t early optimize. I profile and fix as needed. One of the early studios I worked for wrote all our games in UIKit as prototypes, when performance tanked we’d switch to the appropriate tools (eg. OpenGL) where it was necessary — like in the core game.
I could go on but in the end just use the right tool for the job, if you’re not proficient in SwiftUI or it isn’t going to work for your cross platform project, you have a lot of other alternatives. For me though, it’s been amazing to work with. I stepped away from iOS programming for 3 - 4 years because I was burnt out using storyboards, dealing with massive view controllers, and all the boiler plate it’d take to get a view up and going in UIKit. SwiftUI roped me back in.
* Quick addition edit: Cross platform for iOS, iPad, macOS has never been good. I’ve found recent updates have made things better to the point of tolerable and it’s nothing like when we had to post-fix an ~ipad to our Nibs — There has never been a ‘glory days’ of cross platform Apple UI libraries.
As a solo app developper for two years mainly for apple platform(previously do networking infra software using C/Go)
After two many trial and fail, now it's quite clear to me that for simple UI I will use swiftUI(such as help sheet or simple toggles), for complex and performance first, I will just use UIKit instead, it save a log of time and actually the imperative UIKit is also quite easy to read and review
the feasibility of review is important because code is not mainly written by agent, though as my understanding of UIKit grows I can smell the bad part and let it rewrite
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.
I think SwiftUI is just a reflection of the times we live in. If you look around, many things which used to be done at "great" or "amazing" levels, are now just "good enough". Cars, houses, software, service - it all is just a reflection of the attitude, and even I noticed that I follow this in some of my day-to-day decisions.
Apple had a real winner with ObjC and AppKit. Swift is horrendously complicated for the benefits it offers over ObjC, and SwiftUI is a massive step backwards from AppKit.
Just MHO, and it’s not going to stop the juggernaut, but there’s just no appeal in moving there for me :( If (when ?) Apple drop ObjC, that’s the day I move to Linux
I have recently completed building a large native macOS app and my take is that, for 90% of work, SwiftUI is good but for the 10% you would need AppKit.
For my app which is a AI chat app, I needed to load and show a large number of chat items in a list, SwiftUI is really bad at this. Another issue is, most of Swift markdown libraries don't perform perform well because each elements are rendered as SwiftUI views which introduced a lot of issues So I built my own renderer using TextKit. Even basic things like Settings window is broken. But I still prefer using SwiftUI as It gets the work done faster and I can always fallback to AppKit.
I find that web tech like React are worst than SwiftUI. React also has re-rendering and state management issues
Despite all the trends, I still really like HTML for structure, CSS for styling, and JavaScript for logic.
The boundaries aren’t perfectly clean, and that’s fine. But the separation gives you a useful way to think: structure this first, style it later, add behaviour where needed.
My experience with Compose—though I suspect SwiftUI people will recognise the feeling—is that I have to think about everything, everywhere, all the time.
Then we add some MVVM/UDF flavour. The "ViewModel" knows nothing about the view, despite usually serving exactly one screen. Add some "MutableStateFlow"s, combine them into "ScreenUiState", expose it as a "StateFlow", collect it with lifecycle awareness.
Beautifully decoupled. Extremely testable.
Then the organisation writes no unit tests and relies entirely on two-hour nightly screen tests.
A welcome-page refactor breaks the profile page.
“Didn’t you check the nightly build?”
No. It runs at night.
“Well, that’s your responsibility.”
But you broke it.
“Yes, but it’s your code.”
Then why did we ship it?
Fine. Schedule the postmortem with my mother.
And I’m not blaming mobile developers here. I’m frontend, backend, full-stack, I think AI engineer now. I have personally helped make simple things complicated across the entire stack.
What I like about the web is that one simple screen can be vanilla JavaScript. Another can use Vue. Another can use some specialised spreadsheet component.
People react to that with horror: what if components are duplicated, behave or look slightly different?
Fair concern. But that is real coupling with visible consequences and trade-offs. Somehow we have started treating coupling as something abstract that only exists inside code, rather than something that should produce an actual benefit when removed.
HTML. CSS. JavaScript. Or something close to it.
Maybe I’m getting old.
I've noticed that developers who started with UIKit really have a hard time working with SwiftUI. I think this is because it's not just new syntax, it's an entirely different way to think: state is the source of truth, views are ephemeral, and you describe UI instead of managing it.
Used SwiftUI mainly on macOS since it was first released.
On macOS it is still comes up short on a lot of the GUI functionality. Stuff like window management, decoration, focus, undo/redo, finder tree type views etc. What Apple have implemented seems okay to me for iPad, iOS etc, but is not up to the standards users' expect for non-trivial native desktop applications.
With enough determination most of the omissions on macOS can be worked around by breaking the SwiftUI encapsulation and delving into AppKit or jarringly inelegant solutions. All of which are somewhat liable to ended up binned when/if Apple pull their fingers out. I had higher expectations of Apple, and overall, it's easy to understand why it does not have a stellar reputation.
As to why it's a bit rubbish on macOS; SwiftUI is largely a mapping to UIKit, AppKit etc primitives. At a guess Apple wants to reduce that number and are seeking to minimise investment in moribund technology.
Death by a thousand cuts. First the tech community screamed about memory leaks, so they bolted ARC (automatic resource counting) into Cocoa since unlike C++, Objective-C had no RAII. With swift to be compatible, they forced ARC to all objects. To make RAD (rapid application devolpment), they forced InterfaceBuilder onto the dev community, where artists do layout, but engineers do code. With variable sized screens, RAD tools add constraints to layout, since artists do gui, not engineers. To support Retina displays where GUI is x2, two sets of constraints were added. Spaghetti after twine after hack after crap.
All this goes away if you use a language with RAII, dont treat your devs as morons that cannot manage resources, and allow procedural GUI - let smart dev fix layout and pixels per inch. Artist can create mockup screens in photoshot or after effects, devs do actual procedural coding.
But no, we’ve gone the LEGO assembly way to avoid hiring smart devs.
Disclaimer - I do graphic engines with GUI toolkits for a living.
I'll be honest, I struggled to get much done with SwiftUI each of the last four years but this summer I started 4 greenfield iOS 27 apps on SwiftUI and it's genuinely been pretty delightful and none have required escape hatches to UIKit/AppKit.
I get people are upset, but the edge cases and frustration in no way feel like fundamental failures—just stuff they haven't gotten around to yet. Yes, they should have gotten to them all sooner but that doesn't convince me they won't eventually.
there's yet to be a decent-looking SwiftUI app on the desktop. elements are always too small, spacing is wrong, & the keyboard is a second-class citizen. mobile-first is a disaster.
For small apps I use exclusively SwiftUI for anything more complicated I use a combo of Sciter and Swift (courtesy of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=c-smile).
There are still a lot of rough edges when it comes to look and feel on Apple platforms but it gives me the performance and speed while also being multiplatform.
The odd thing is that UIKit can easily be transformed into a much more pleasant experience if you just fix some of the worst API’s, like embedding ViewControllers and adding constraints in code.
I would only take this article seriously if you have to support old iOS versions.
NavigationStack has been around since iOS 16, @Observable since iOS 17. and I'm not sure if the author is aware that GeometryReader hasn't been necessary since iOS 18 added onGeometryChange modifiers. Nearly 100% of users are on iOS 16+.
I'm doing some fairly complex work with SwiftUI and I find most components work identically between iPad and macOS. I can work for a week without needing to test on an iPad.
There are problems with SwiftUI for sure: I'm finding macOS performance on an M2 Max is far worse than an iPad M1, especially with animations. Toolbars are very inconsistent between platforms and the compiler timeouts are a real pain (hopefully Swift 6.4 will fix that).
Autolayout, while flawed like anything else, remains the pinnacle of UI across all platforms.
SwiftUI is a laudable attempt to idiot-proof UI, but it sacrifices too much and ultimately fails.
my take is apple should've hired or worked more with external partners in terms of handling swift.
1. the language had all the right hook points to replace python - but then it was closed off in the apple ecosystem for a while. then it was made to be complex as C++ as time went on. if Swift had remained as simple as Go - and Apple had made a push for swift to go beyond apps in their ecosystem the language for data/ml would be swift
2. in regards to swiftUI - almost the same point as 1. react native took over cz it was a simpler more open ecosystem. then eventually most people stopped bothering with native apps (they're used to track you) - web apps are equally good. hence for most people they use native apps for maps, banking.
Any modern-day Windows developers want to chime in around WinRT and other stuff Microsoft has been up to? I’m still on Win32 and WinForms.
> 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.
I liked the promise, but the reality has been disappointing.
SwiftUI is great for test harnesses and admin utilities, but I won't use it for shipping software. I have one app that I rewrote in SwiftUI, just so that I can say that I have shipped it, but I am still using UIKit for most of my apps.
I'm not thrilled with UIKit, but SwiftUI has kind of withered on the vine.
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.
If you’re just getting AI to build you an iOS app, is there any reason to use SwiftUI over UIKit?
You know those games you buy as Early Access while they're still in development, with the implied promise that development will be done some day? And how many of those games have stayed Early Access over so many years that you stopped believing they will ever be done? That's SwiftUI. I won't touch it.
SwiftUI has a lot of failings, but it can also do a lot of things that are really tricky in UIKit.
I can render Metal shaders trivially in SwiftUI. Rendering glows, and blurs, and animated effects is much easier in SwiftUI than in UIKit, just use `.blur(radius:)` or `.blendMode(...)`
I have used AppKit and then UIKit since its inception. Creating visual effects like layer masks that modulate the opacity of underlying views is trivially easy in SwiftUI — far easier than the boilerplate and constant bookkeeping that CALayer's mask requires.
So a lot of the advanced full-screen animations in some of my games and apps are SwiftUI, because they are performant, provide the cool effects and animations, and work great. A lot of the simple get-the-job-done views and tool palettes in my apps are also SwiftUI, again because they don't ask much and get the job done, and look great.
However, where SwiftUI falls down is exactly what was demoed in the video: large collections of thumbnails that fetch asynchronously? Use UIKit. Multi-thousands of items in large, complicated lists? You can try SwiftUI, but you'll need to learn how to optimize it.
Other things, not mentioned in the video, that are more annoying in SwiftUI: want to take control of a transition between views, end-to-end? Not really possible in SwiftUI. There are bugs with ZoomNavigationTransition that affect all of Apple's own apps, and you aren't gonna be able to fix them without switching to UIKit.
SwiftUI has a bunch of problems but almost none of them have anything to do with what this guy has to say :( Like, there are issues with almost every point:
> We started with @State, @Binding, and ObservedObjects. Then Apple realized the performance was disastrous and SwiftUI was re-rendering views all the time. That’s when it introduced the Observation framework and the @Observable macro. They tried to solve the problem with compiler tricks, but it clearly wasn’t enough so the layout engine continued its guessing games.
Not why @Observable was introduced
> In SwiftUI, you can never know for sure how many times a view will update and, when it does, why it chose to.
Instruments tells you these days
> That demo project from the SwiftUI tutorial has a very standard, non-custom one. You build the project with the latest Xcode and launch the app on the latest macOS—only to get this.
Yeah, it's a demo marked as "this is old, please do not use it"?
> What is a SwiftUI problem is the overall fragility of UI layouts. They fall apart in the most unexpected ways and at the most unfortunate moments. You can see it in the very real, production apps like UTM. It’s a fantastic piece of engineering, but its reliance on SwiftUI sometimes makes it feel like an early prototype.
This is an app written by someone who spends most of their time writing graphics APIs I think the fact that they can do something half-decent is really a testament to how approachable SwiftUI is
> In the end, you find yourself wrapping everything in a GeometryReader. And this is the ultimate admission of defeat.
No I only use GeometryReader when I actually want to do some coordinate math
> Okay, maybe you want to let your users customize the window toolbar, just as they could since 2001 (or something like that). Well, SwiftUI received this “breakthrough” feature only a few years ago.
iOS 14 my guy, this is literally one year after SwiftUI was released
> And then there’s the most basic task: displaying images you fetched from the network. Well, you better write your own fetcher, because AsyncImage was introduced only in iOS 15.
Can you point me at the API in UIKit that lets you do this?
> But if you want to also cache those images, I’ve got bad news for you: You can’t do it at all because right now, in July 2026, this API is still in beta.
Or this?
> For all these scenarios, developers usually come up with their own hacks and workarounds.
Yeah, it's called "you download one of a handful of libraries to do it for you". Now you don't have to do that.
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 was doomed from the beginning. Not only Apple completely blew the implementation, it was actually DoA by a bunch of super bad decisions that ultimately make it incredibly hard to work with and manage, especially on bigger apps.
1. It uses the builder pattern for views (familiar to those who used Java) but for some reason they decided to make it so that the order of the modifiers in the builder matters. Each modifier doesn't actually modify the main view but it modifies what the modifier before it decided to return. This makes no sense as the modifiers should each be modifying the main view to make everything predictable and easy to debug. I'm convinced no one (not even senior devs with 5 years of SwiftUI experience) understands how the ordering of modifiers works. It's just swap them until it does what you want it to.
2. The view lifecycles and code execution path seem random and hidden behind layers of "magic," making it incredibly difficult for developers to trace and debug issues.
3. It is practically impossible to set breakpoints for rendering and view construction, it's impossible to really figure out when re-renders happen and what drives them. I'm convinced SwiftUI apps are incredibly slow not because the SwiftUI implementation itself is slow, it's because, even Apple's own apps probably do a bunch of unnecessary re-renders and one no one seems to have any idea. This is unfortunately another design issue that can't be solved by just making SwiftUI more efficient. It requires simplification and tooling to help developers not footgun themselves.
4. Lots of issues start appearing later on in the development cycle because, for simple apps, bad SwiftUI design decisions and footguns have unnoticeable effects, until the apps gets more complex and things start breaking. Fixing these issues sometimes requires rewriting whole features or spending hours debugging.
5. There seems to be almost no documentation on Liquid Glass. It's laughable that after more than 1 year, Apple has simply refused to document or provide good examples for Liquid Glass, except for maybe couple pages that resemble the brain dump of an engineer that has never passed a writing class in college?
6. Stuff seems to be rapidly changing and breaking from version to version. It took days to make my app look and work the same in iOS 27 as it did on iOS 26, even though iOS 27 is supposed to be a minor bug fix release. We don't even use anything non-standard and don't do any hacks. This defeats the whole purpose of a simple UI framework that can be easily adopted to different platforms (this never used to happen with UIKit).
7. View debugger still has no SwiftUI equivalent. It used to make things so much simpler in UIKit when you could just see the view bounds, pick views apart and understand what's actually happening. SwiftUI has no equivalent other than `.background(.red)`. Terrible.
I don't know how Apple can salvage this beyond just undoing some of these terrible design decisions and making it 1. super simple to work with, 2. stop relying on magic, making things more explicit, and 3. providing actual 1:1 UIKit feature parity.
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Swift is the worst language I’ve ever used. For context I’ve used everything form JavaScript to C++, and Rust is my choice these days.
Swift feels impenetrable. So much syntax and features that are “progressively disclosed” (horrible UX paradigm btw) but instead just jump at you, breaking threading semantics, and horrible tooling. It’s also the only language I cant* get AI to perform decently well at, a double con.
I hate swift so much.
Maybe unrelated, but as an Android dev, a few years ago I wanted to look into SwiftUI.
But now I feel like for most apps, I should be fine with Compose Multiplatform and Kotlin Multiplatform. I don't see the point of learning SwiftUI anymore.
Agreed that SwiftUI because bloated and hacky, when it promised simplification and transparency.
But is there a single UI abstraction that succeeded in affordability for newcomers while maintaining performance and solid architecture?
It is high time to solve the write-3-apps for each usecase (iOS, Android, Windows). I use MAUI on some projects but it is still not perfect.
The way forward for Apple is to open source more and more and let the Swift community build a cross-platform solution.
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.