I remember this post[0], here, a while back.
I’ve been shipping (as opposed to coding), for my entire adult life, and I’ve learned (the hard way, of course) that “ship” is always at least a couple of clicks back from “bleeding edge.”
I’m in the home stretch of an app that I’ve been developing for the last year and a half, or so.
The backend is written in PHP, and the frontend is a “classic” UIKit/Storyboard/MVC app, as opposed to a SwiftUI/Combine/MVVM project.
It’s fairly ambitious, and, when I started, I was not confident that “the bleeding edge” would work (it might have, but I didn’t know that it would). There was no question that the classic patterns would work, so I picked them.
It’s coming along great; far better than I had originally envisioned the project. It is ultra-high-quality, fully native, with only one small external (meaning that I didn't write it, myself) dependency (the backend has zero dependencies), has many capabilities that have only appeared in the last couple of OS releases, is easily localized, conforms to multiple device configurations, dark mode, accessibility features, etc.
I read (here), about a well-known app that had been a highly successful classic native app (probably written in ObjC) that was supposed to be rewritten in SwiftUI, but the project failed, and was eventually shipped in Electron. That’s kind of my worst nightmare. I suspect the developers had to put clothespins on their noses, for much of the project.
I will be releasing software, using more cutting edge tech, but all in good time. It’s unlikely to be “cutting edge,” by the time I use it. I like to give the stack enough time to smooth off the rough edges, before I rely on it for ship.
I know that many fairly well-known applications for Apple platforms, are still written in Objective-C. Even Apple still uses it, for some of its internal tooling.
I will admit that one gamble I took, was jumping on the Swift bandwagon, almost immediately, but there were multiple signals that it was not another OpenDoc[1], and that I could trust it. I’m fairly conservative about bandwagons. It’s earned me more than a few sneers (especially since I’m an older chap), but -and this bears repeating-, I’ve spent my entire adult life, delivering finished software. It’s not always been great software, and it has not always been commercially successful, but it has all been “finished.”
There was a post here, some time back, where the author challenged the reader to mention three projects in their career that they had finished. My comment was that I could mention thirty, and point to the repos. This was met with incredulity, which shocked me, as I have known many developers, far more productive than I. I guess times have changed.
[0] https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc (Full disclosure. I was very much a “bandwagon” guy, back then, and even took an OpenDoc course, from Apple’s DU).