A lot of good news recently for swift. I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.
I really like swift going beyond Apple. Particularly the port to android is IMHO crucial, however, now they are in the UI cross platform hell. Let us see if Apple is playing this better than Microsoft. Unfortunately, I have little hope. The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are react native and flutter which are both UI toolkits first and language second. Which I find gruesome.
It'd be nice if Apple made SwiftUI cross platform and I'd be singing in the streets if UIKit got ported, but that seems unlikely at best.
I believe that there's strong community interest in some kind of Swift UI framework for Android, though, and so there's a substantial chance that a third party solution will appear.
Correct me if im wrong, but isn't the pain points for mobile devs, the need to have intimate knowledge of both pl to build & maintain a good "backend/functionality" of the app over time and that the UI portion of the app is quite simple to learn, build and maintain.
So is it necessary for the swift team to try get swift ui onto android, versus a developer building their app "backend/functionality" in swift, compiling it down for both ios and android, then bridging the android bindings with a UI made in kmp etc
I recently learnt that amo and protonmail use this solution but instead of swift android, they were using uniffi-rs and seemed to have great results, I think proton ditched react native for this solution, which to me sounds like a more streamlined way of getting native performance without needing the overhead of managing multiple language. I guess we will have to see how mature swift android gets and if it can replace uniffi-rs etc which would save even more time
I’d absolutely love it if they made SwiftUI cross platform for both mobile and desktop. Flutter is nice but it’s still sort of a mess sometimes when targeting desktop instead of mobile.
Let’s be honest. It’s a mess targeting iOS. It’s like the old days with VB - first 80% done in no time, last 20% takes forever, requiring ever more elaborate hacks to get around stupid restrictions (eg try hiding the keyboard associated with a TextField when you tap on a Picker).
Don’t have links, but it’s true. iTunes for Windows also includes chunks of AppKit.
The Windows ports of AppKit in both likely trace their lineages back to Yellow Box, which was the Windows port of AppKit that Apple briefly made available prior to the release of OS X 10.0.
Jetpack Compose is just as "native" as Android views at this point; it hooks into the same accessibility frameworks and renders to the same surfaces as the framework toolkit. This isn't like Flutter which renders to an opaque Skia buffer.
UIKit is very mature and tied to the iOS ecosystem and a bit more complex. SwiftUI is easier to port (since it is still a incomplete / subset features of UIKit).
Yes historically but not by design. It's more of a transition tactic.
Starting with iOS 26, new UIKit and AppKit features are implemented by "native" SwiftUI (specifically, Liquid Glass's implementation). In recent years they have also been replacing UIKit/AppKit-backed SwiftUI views with "native" SwiftUI implementations.
But besides this technical change I don't think Apple has any desire to bring SwiftUI to other platforms.
BTW: https://skip.tools has bridged it to Compose. Your SwiftUI code runs in native Swift on Android.
> I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.
Depends on what you think fancy things are. Both C# and .net are busy releasing a lot of features.
You're forgetting that C# is a 25-year-old language at this time. The exciting features they release are things like "access native memory allocation in a GC language", "native Arm64 support", "support for post-quantum cryptography", "tensor support" etc. while already running on all the platforms that Swift is only now announcing as achievements.
I guess it's a matter of perspective. Dotnet 10 just came out[1] with a bunch of solid new shiny that I'm enjoying.
And, as it stands, Dotnet is much further along in the multi-platform game than Swift. As far as I know, none of the Swift-based UI stuff is being ported to, let alone going to be usable on non-Apple platforms.
> The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are [...] and flutter
I wouldn't really call Flutter "native".
I don't have a strong enough grasp of where React Native is at now. It was severely lacking when I looked at it circa 2018. But then we needed to call in to our own native code libraries, so we were probably quite niche.
Xamarin.Forms worked well enough, but the transition to MAUI has been full of woe and even more bugs and weird edge case functionality than Xamarin had.
I really like swift going beyond Apple. Particularly the port to android is IMHO crucial, however, now they are in the UI cross platform hell. Let us see if Apple is playing this better than Microsoft. Unfortunately, I have little hope. The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are react native and flutter which are both UI toolkits first and language second. Which I find gruesome.