I don't think it's just wishful thinking, but I've noticed a sharp downturn in the discourse and mood around SwiftUI over the past year, specifically.

[stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social]

I don't think it's just wishful thinking, but I've noticed a sharp downturn in the discourse and mood around SwiftUI over the past year, specifically. Patience running thin?

[maxbob@det.social]

@stroughtonsmith I am just annoyed because stuff like SwiftData seems to have been thrown into it and then ignored afterwards. Still waiting for shared databases for years now

[kyle@mister.computer]

@stroughtonsmith Programming agents + deep personal UIKit expertise mean that I can now work faster, at a higher level of quality, consistently across more OS versions, than SwiftUI could ever have promised. I can imagine that I would be able to go even faster had SwiftUI lived up to its goals, but regardless, none of its compromises are necessary any longer. I can now clock it exclusively as the disappointment it is, versus what I needed to hope it could become.

[hoagie@jawns.club]

@stroughtonsmith Programmatic UIKit is like 85% less rage-inducing when you're doing LLM development. Once I saw that light, I went back and un-SwiftUI'd my first app a whole bunch, and it's so much nicer to modify now.

[niclake@mastodon.social]

@stroughtonsmith I'm currently learning SwiftUI.

26.4 preview windows don't let you scroll or swipe. Crashes & requires an Xcode restart.

Seems like this kind of stuff is, if not the norm, then at least common enough where the general response is "welcome to iOS development, here's a cookie".

[its_john_davis@mastodon.social]

@stroughtonsmith I use it exclusively. But it’s been over 5 years and there’s still no collection view component. I understand why people don’t like it for many things.

[nemesisprime@iosdev.space]

@stroughtonsmith SwiftUI has always been doing too much. If it was just a simple layout system within the platforms and it trusted the developer instead of forcing adaptive magic sauce everywhere, I think it'd have a lot more positive sentiment today!

I love building UIs with it, but hate building apps with it.

[stevex@mastodon.social]

@stroughtonsmith It's been such a disappointment. Many problems were obvious on day one and just never got addressed.

[oberstal@infosec.exchange]

@stroughtonsmith as a newb iOS developer, pre-LLMs I struggled with SwiftUI for months, I just couldn’t build UIs with the level of polish I’d see in other apps. Then Opus 4.6 dropped and UIKit was no longer a chore. Apps are faster, have access to more functionality, and I understand the failure modes. Haven’t seen “unable to type check expression” timeouts since switching!, and I’m focusing on what my app does instead of trying to demystify yet another SwiftUI edge case or workaround to get something which is working OOTB in UIKit.