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The Swift SDK for Android

swift.org

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Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#211

Post by dvtkrlbs »

bsimpson wrote: post #86

The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI? Adobe products (both the Creative Suite, and their Flex Builder environment for Flash app) had their own design system that felt foreign on every platform it shipped on. If you wanted something that felt native, you had to reimplement e.g. Apple Aqua in Flash yourself. Flutter goes out of its way to do that work for you, aiming…

Except Flutter hit a wall with the liquid glass on IOS and Material 3 on android since they implement all the widgets from scratch implementing the new UI language will take considerable amount of effort and they are saying this is not even their roadmap RN.

Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#212

Post by [deleted] »

afro88 wrote: post #166
tomovo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean Kotlin Multiplatform, it works pretty well. Not easy to debug, the GC is a bit weaker than the Android implementation and optimized builds can get crazy slow as the app grows. The interface uses auto-generated ObjC headers which are very verbose. Native Swift API is in beta. Overall still worth it for a commercial app, I think.

We use it in my team and it works well enough, but iOS is a bit second class citizen. Everything translates to Obj-C (NSObject at the root), so even something as simple as a data class becomes NSObjects with a cumbersome dev experience rather than a native swift enum. We're looking forward to native swift export to go stable - it's currently experimental / beta.

[deleted]

Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#213

Post by [deleted] »

dvtkrlbs wrote: post #211
bsimpson wrote: post #86

The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI? Adobe products (both the Creative Suite, and their Flex Builder environment for Flash app) had their own design system that felt foreign on every platform it shipped on. If you wanted something that felt native, you had to reimplement e.g. Apple Aqua in Flash yourself. Flutter goes out of its way to do that work for you, aiming…

Except Flutter hit a wall with the liquid glass on IOS and Material 3 on android since they implement all the widgets from scratch implementing the new UI language will take considerable amount of effort and they are saying this is not even their roadmap RN.

[deleted]

Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#214

Post by planb »

rustystump wrote: post #128
bsimpson wrote: post #86

The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI? Adobe products (both the Creative Suite, and their Flex Builder environment for Flash app) had their own design system that felt foreign on every platform it shipped on. If you wanted something that felt native, you had to reimplement e.g. Apple Aqua in Flash yourself. Flutter goes out of its way to do that work for you, aiming…

Very unpopular opinion but i like apps that ashew looking “native” for an original ux. Maybe it is my love for gamedev and all the crazy designs they come up with but i personally loath boring uninspired native apps esp when the native ux is terrible. Apple wants everyone to conform because historically their ux is on point but the last update really reinforces my view.

IMHO, Apps can look (and maybe even "feel") any way they want. But when it comes to integration into the system, they should be as native as possible. It'S 2025 and I can't drag and drop from/to the Gmail app on iOS - that's ridiculous (especially because I can't have real-time push notifications for IMAP in the mail app for Gmail account, which as far as I know is also a limitation by the Gmail servers, not by IMAP itself).

Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#216

Post by randyrand »

ignoramous wrote: post #46
jajuuka wrote: post #19

"You got Kotlin in my iOS." "You got Swift in my Android."

Kotlin on iOS is statically compiled and interops with Swift/ObjC natively. Don't think KMP on iOS is even running a VM like Flutter has to with Dart? https://kotlinlang.org/docs/native-overview.html

Dart runs natively. It only uses a VM in dev builds for hot reload.

In fact, you can even link native frameworks into your Dart code.

[1] https://dart.dev/overview#native-platform

[2] https://dart.dev/interop/c-interop

Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#217

Post by Someone »

bsimpson wrote: post #86

The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI? Adobe products (both the Creative Suite, and their Flex Builder environment for Flash app) had their own design system that felt foreign on every platform it shipped on. If you wanted something that felt native, you had to reimplement e.g. Apple Aqua in Flash yourself. Flutter goes out of its way to do that work for you, aiming…

> The most important question for every cross platform framework

I don’t think this is a cross platform framework. AFAICT, It’s a Swift toolchain (compiler + Swift standard library) that allows you to call Android APIs.

Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#218

Post by saagarjha »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #113
bsimpson wrote: post #86

The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI? Adobe products (both the Creative Suite, and their Flex Builder environment for Flash app) had their own design system that felt foreign on every platform it shipped on. If you wanted something that felt native, you had to reimplement e.g. Apple Aqua in Flash yourself. Flutter goes out of its way to do that work for you, aiming…

The Browser Company did an amazing job of porting SwiftUI to Windows, where the element primitives in the language map to native Windows UI C++ classes under the hood. Perhaps the future of Swift for Android is similar, where SwiftUI will map to Jetpack elements. That would be cool. Remember on iOS and MacOS, SwiftUI is not "native". It's a description language that system frameworks interpret and create NSViews and…

SwiftUI in many cases generates views that were written specifically to back the description you requested. I think that’s pretty native.

Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#219

Post by zigzag312 »

palata wrote: post #99
bsimpson wrote: post #86

The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI? Adobe products (both the Creative Suite, and their Flex Builder environment for Flash app) had their own design system that felt foreign on every platform it shipped on. If you wanted something that felt native, you had to reimplement e.g. Apple Aqua in Flash yourself. Flutter goes out of its way to do that work for you, aiming…

> The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI? I kindly disagree. The first feature I want from a cross-platform framework is that it lets me write a native UI. That's why I like KMP: I can just share a framework with an iOS app built with SwiftUI. Sharing business logic makes a lot of sense in a ton of cases and has been done forever (C/C++/Rust/Go libraries, etc). Sharin…

> Sharing UI in complex apps, in my experience, always ends up being a "write once - debug everywhere" nightmare.

Was that with UI framework that wraps platform's UI framework or with one that draws controls on its own? Shared complex UI is not much of an issue with frameworks that fully implement their own controls. But quality implementation of controls from the ground up is a lot of work so there's not many good UI frameworks that do this.

Re: The Swift SDK for Android

#220

Post by saagarjha »

wiseowise wrote: post #192
bpavuk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. there is an aspect you are missing. no one in their right mind wants to bundle Chromium with every app install, and every Discord user hates mobile Discord app, which is, guess what? uses Chromium!

There’s no Chromium in RN, that’s the whole idea behind Native part. It ships optimized JS runtime called Hermes. And Discord mobile app on iOS doesn’t even use RN, it’s a native application.

No, it’s React Native.
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