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ardit33today at 7:57 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


Replies

Razengantoday at 8:01 PM

> With AI coding... SwiftUI lost its edge/advantage

On the contrary, I think AI has made it EASIER to approach SwiftUI now, because AI makes up for SwiftUI's biggest weaknesses: the many ways of doing everything, Apple's wonky documentation and the need to know when to fall back to AppKit/UIKit.

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