Skip is now free and open source

I assume that’s for the development phase, not (necessarily) for apps developed with Skip

You can chill - it was their oversight that they’ve already corrected, not an omission by design

Hey! (firstly recognized you from your other post on HN)

Personally I would love the idea of creating a lua application natively. You don't know how much I wanted it now that you mention it.

I remember looking for such solutions,finding none, then I even thought of using kotlin apps with lua integration but didn't like the idea of learning kotlin

For some reason, even though I have only played just a little bit with lua, there are tons of options which compile down to lua which can make it really powerful too and so for the end developer, there are tons of possibilities and it starts out being so simple!

I think the problem with lua was that there is a lack of libraries & projects regarding it so this might actually help it

I have another question tho and I'd love it if you can answer it.

Is there any way that I can write a cli application in golang or port it to something with just glue code being lua and using it for android somehow?

I don't want to create an android application in golang itself for what its worth because I find the primitive a little lacking (what do I use, wails?)

I have heard people use python kite or something iirc which looked good but python-go support isn't the best & i dont even know if its on android

If you can actually provide lua as the UI/UX support (I am imagining something simple but powerful) with code being allowed in other languages where I can get some powerful libraries (golang), I would be super interested in it.

Regarding Open source, I would personally trust the project a lot more if this was open source.

That being said, I understand the worry of changing careers/consultancy/AI marketing because I am still a teenager in high school. I have anxiety because I have an exam for the colleg ein 2 days, I am a bit cooked haha but I guess I just gotta try

Your fears are valid and somehow I imagine you in a position wayy similar to raylib & I remembered this post.

https://gist.github.com/raysan5/04a2daf02aa2a6e79010331f77bf...

Honestly, what are your thoughts in teaching at a college about app development with lua, I mean I am a teenager and I would die for such a course!

Although I was never into roblox, some of my friends were and they treat lua as the holy grail because of roblox development and roblox's development community is from what I can gather decently respected especially if you are teen, some even learn lua just for it.

so you can get people who are interested in already having some gui experience with lua (more in a game environment but still) and you tell them that you can make apps with it just as easily? People will be hooked.

Of course there is some LLM but honestly, nobody cares. LLM's wont be able to recreate your project, I am mostly sure of it.

Marketing is something that I relate with too because we never know what the public really really wants.

I mean, I will admit it, We people are kind of hypocrites (speaking from my behalf)

Sometimes we would open source project and want it to be sustainable without paying the devs or donating to them, that sucks. Some of us just want open source for ideological reasons and um, honestly, I will admit it. It's your code, do what you want it, you built it and you should be proud of it!

We can only give suggestions but I recommend you to create some video of the project so that I can see it.

App developments are fucking nightmares. I had even thought of using godot just to create app development. Any new solution provided decent enough can absolutely help.

Personally I believe you should wait for some time & try to write a blog post about it. I want to hear all the nerdy details!

Create a show HN post, I saw tomhow mention to me how much of the audience wants originality and the idea of "aha moments"/something novel. Provide us with knowledge of what aha moments did you discover during building this, I am soo curious myself!

Good luck man and I genuinely hope the best of luck for you man! Just message me whenever you feel like it or mail me, Will try to respond to ya if you ever need my help (I don't think so but I'd love to playtest what you are mentioning too!)

Oh yea just a teeny bti suggestion adding on that golang one, can you just make it so that I can have a very simple and easy/fast way of compiling golang cli applications into gui android applications with lua code. I personally want this so bad because there are soo many good and lovely open source golang cli and I wanted to be part of f-droid by creating an application gui for some golang cli tool we might use but it felt sooooooo hard that I gave up. (Yes I even used tauri and ended up waking up till 5 am debugging)

The pain point's definitely real and LLM's won't be able to make this. Only the people like you who are truly passionate about such projects can make it. It's a unique project and you should be proud of it and I hope that the project has a good future!

Good question. I'll try to answer as objectively as possible, despite my bias towards Skip's approach.

Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) enables you to target different platforms with your Kotlin. In the context of mobile apps, it allows you to compile your Kotlin to a native framework for iOS, so you can reuse your business logic. On iOS, the Kotlin is running in its own little garbage-collected runtime, but it sets up a bridge to Objective-C and Swift, so the iOS developers can communicate with it from their apps (the interface of which will typically be written separately for each platform). It is neat technology, and Skip integrates with it[1]. We were on their Talking Kotlin podcast in 2024 talking about it[2].

When targeting just the shared business logic and not the UI, Skip is, in some ways, the inverse of KMP: whereas they let you share Kotlin logic between the iOS and Android app, Skip lets you share the Swift logic. Skip operates in two different modes[3]: Skip Lite and Skip Fuse. Skip Lite is the original version of Skip, and transpiles your Swift into Kotlin. Skip Fuse is a later iteration and resulted from the formation of the Swift Android workgroup[4], of which we are founding members. In both modes, you can share your Skip business logic layer between multiple apps, and this is a popular application of Skip (e.g., see this talk at NSSpain[5]).

So that's the story for shared logic. Now onto the user interface part:

While I mentioned that Skip _can_ be used just for sharing business logic, it really shines when you build your whole app with it. You write your app in conventional SwiftUI, and Skip will translate it into the equivalent Jetpack Compose (which is now Android's official recommended way to build apps). Launching your app from Xcode will bring up both your iOS app in the simulator, and the equivalent Android app in the emulator. It is designed to be a single vertically-integrated app creation solution, and enables a single team (or a single developer) to iterate on both platforms at the same time, without any of the coordination overhead of building two separate apps for the two platforms.

KMP itself doesn't have an equivalent, but it does have a sibling project "Compose Multiplatform" (CMP), which is built on top of KMP and sort of does the opposite: it lets you write your app in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose and run it on iOS. But the way that it achieves this is different from Skip's approach: it doesn't use native controls on iOS, but instead paints pixels on the screen that mimic the native iOS UI (à la Flutter). The results are predictable: an uncanny valley UI that doesn't feel _quite_ right, and that struggles to keep up with the platform conventions. Notably, like Flutter, they won't be able to support Liquid Glass in any convincing form, and so apps built with it are going to be stuck on outdated iOS UI conventions. In short: CMP is native on Android but alien on iOS, whereas Skip is native on both platforms.

That's our take on the difference between the two. In fairness to KMP, they do have some distinct advantages in terms of reach: whereas Skip is squarely focused on just mobile platforms, KMP can target desktops and the web as well. If that is a priority for you, or you already have a lot of Kotlin experience or are invested in the ecosystem, then KMP might be a good fit for your needs. But if you like Swift and SwiftUI, and are happy working with the Apple developer tools, then you should give Skip a try. It really is magic.

[1]: https://skip.dev/blog/skip-and-kotlin-multiplatform/

[2]: https://talkingkotlin.com/going-from-swift-to-kotlin-with-sk...

[3]: https://skip.dev/docs/modes/

[4]: https://www.swift.org/android-workgroup/

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIGl6GOo210

Shame that the world has to be like this in the first place :Perhaps I am way too altruist at times & the world is capitalist without any discrimination, stealing anyone's work and reselling it feels so scummy and I have heard it happen actually so you are not actually completely in the wrong and its your code and your lifestyle and so I respect it. (Even if I am an open source advocate, I will admit making money from Open source is super hard in many cases)

Interestingly, what's your thoughts on Source available licenses. Like, honestly, like use a license which doesn't allow reusing components or providing another appstore release of that or similar

If you use github actions with immutable and other instances, I feel like there is a real way of like verifying that the code written is safe & people can verify it & trust it.

If people want to modify your product, they have to pay you and get in touch with you.

I will take this with additional security context and being able to audit over having nothing in the first place! (Hopefully I hope this might not impact your living either in any way and honestly even if you do this! Some of us would deeply appreciate it)

Something is better than nothing. If even much of the world goes to source available licenses, I feel like the transition to open source of softwares becomes much simpler as well if enough conditions (like people start donating/govts start investing in open source) etc. happen!

Source availability still provides one to that direction & is still overall positive with atleast in this context, virtually zero downsides.

What are your thoughts on it?