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Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

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Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#11

Post by jonplackett »

saagarjha wrote: post #6
Jakobeha wrote: post #4

> As of June 2020, Apple Reports that 92% of devices introduced in the last 4 years use iOS 13, while 81% of all devices (including the oldest) use iOS 13. Some businesses are not willing to part with that remaining 8%-19% of users. I'm surprised that so many people have the latest iOS. I was reluctant to use SwiftUI because I thought that more people have older iPhones which wouldn't support it.

iOS adoption rates are extremely high these days, especially with the long support periods devices get and various ways to reduce friction while updating.

Plus the constant, never-ending nagging!

Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#13

Post by ollysb »

mikenew wrote: post #9

I've been working full time on an app in SwiftUI for the past 8 months or so. I'll sum it up this way: I frequently oscillate between thinking "This is amazing, it truly is a joy to work with SwiftUI" and "Holy FUCK this is the most infuriating thing I've ever experienced in my life". I can't comment on the documentation, because there isn't any. The closest thing you get is the WWDC videos from the past few years wh…

Can't agree more with this. Coming from Elm/React to my first project in Swift choosing SwiftUI seemed like the obvious choice. It always felt like the type system wasn't quite powerful enough to express the API. Once you add Combine into the mix type erasure makes debugging issues unspeakably painful, errors appearing on the wrong lines at best and often in entirely different files. Then there's the tooling, Swift Package Manager was endlessly running into mysterious issues that would eventually disappear if I just rebuilt the project enough times. As for SwiftUI preview I have no idea what was going on there but it brought my brand new iMac to a halt, simple code changes causing multiple minutes of the dreaded spinner. I was using Swift for a side project and the issues just destroyed all motivation to continue with it. I've since switched to Flutter which while the language isn't as capable (though reified generics are a huge improvement) does at least feel like a solid tool to build apps with.

Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#14

Post by dilap »

pritambarhate wrote: post #7
Jakobeha wrote: post #4

> As of June 2020, Apple Reports that 92% of devices introduced in the last 4 years use iOS 13, while 81% of all devices (including the oldest) use iOS 13. Some businesses are not willing to part with that remaining 8%-19% of users. I'm surprised that so many people have the latest iOS. I was reluctant to use SwiftUI because I thought that more people have older iPhones which wouldn't support it.

As per this Wikipedia article[1], more than 2 billion iOS devices were sold by September 2018. 19% of 2B is 380M devices. So by going iOS 13 only quite a few potential users are left out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_and_iPadOS_devices

Though I wonder what fraction of those people are interested in installing new software? I wouldn't be surprised if it was pretty small.

Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#15

Post by auggierose »

pritambarhate wrote: post #7
Jakobeha wrote: post #4

> As of June 2020, Apple Reports that 92% of devices introduced in the last 4 years use iOS 13, while 81% of all devices (including the oldest) use iOS 13. Some businesses are not willing to part with that remaining 8%-19% of users. I'm surprised that so many people have the latest iOS. I was reluctant to use SwiftUI because I thought that more people have older iPhones which wouldn't support it.

As per this Wikipedia article[1], more than 2 billion iOS devices were sold by September 2018. 19% of 2B is 380M devices. So by going iOS 13 only quite a few potential users are left out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_and_iPadOS_devices

I doubt all of those sold devices are still functional.

Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#16

Post by auggierose »

For a new app, it is a no brainer. I've been coding up an interface in SwiftUI in the last week that would have taken me ages with UIKit. And the resulting interface is so much better, because tuning a small detail corresponds to a single line or two instead of the agony of spinning up a new UIViewController ...

Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#17

Post by lupinglade »

SwiftUI is pretty and a pleasure to work with when you want to do something that is expected. The moment you need something more, SwiftUI is not your friend anymore. Too much is hidden away in internal implementation details and much of it is broken, incomplete or completely missing. It may be adequate on iOS, but on a Mac it is nowhere near usable at this stage.

Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#18

Post by bartvk »

lupinglade wrote: post #17

SwiftUI is pretty and a pleasure to work with when you want to do something that is expected. The moment you need something more, SwiftUI is not your friend anymore. Too much is hidden away in internal implementation details and much of it is broken, incomplete or completely missing. It may be adequate on iOS, but on a Mac it is nowhere near usable at this stage.

How did you find out about this?

Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#19

Post by shinycode »

I spent a year building an app from scratch in pure SwiftUI. The first few month were difficult because of the bugs and missing doc. But then it got refined and enhanced. I could do almost everything I wanted with it and this years release brought well waited features.

Thanks to Big Mountain Studio’s work on documentation and lots of blogs with nice articles (swift with majid) it’s possible to get a good grasp on the subject.

It’s definitely the future and a real joy to work with, definitely so in new projects.

The app I built is bulletweek.

Re: Should I use SwiftUI in production? A code-to-code comparison to help you decide

#20

Post by mushishi »

My personal experience: after working on existing UIKit application for over a month or so, I spent a couple of weeks trying SwiftUI out in last summer, by first watching most of the Stanford's great SwiftUI iOS lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIYdYpPXil4&list=PLpGHT1n4-m...

With the little experience I got, I agree with mikenew's comment. SwiftUI felt like an expressive way to define UI elements, but I had some small weird details that took long time to solve, perhaps because I defined something in a way that wasn't supposed to. Ultimately, I mostly got the code to look in the way I preferred, but for example regarding animation or gestures there were some problematic details I didn't want to spend time to get exactly right.

Overall I enjoyed it much more than UIKit but I would hesitate to use it in the future in a professional setting without properly investigating how mature it is at that point of time.

If anyone is interested, here's the Shogi app I developed, intended for two local two players, and as a reminder I am quite new to the iOS ecosystem: https://github.com/EvidentSolutions/toodim

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