SwiftUI

“The abstraction is huge advantage, especially when targeting different devices and screen sizes.”

“Layouts will not magically be not dog shit on iOS because Apple put out another version of SwiftUI that you can't use in prod”

“Layouts will not magically be not dog shit on iOS because Apple put out another version of SwiftUI that you can't use in prod because nobody has the update.”

“SwiftUI is at least the right idea for a UI framework, it's just been implemented horribly.”

“SwiftUI has a bunch of problems but almost none of them have anything to do with what this guy has to say”

“There are still a lot of rough edges when it comes to look and feel on Apple platforms”

“Toolbars are very inconsistent between platforms and the compiler timeouts are a real pain”

“SwiftUI has a lot of failings, but it can also do a lot of things that are really tricky in UIKit.”

“for complex and performance first, I will just use UIKit instead, it save a log of time”

“It's not unusual to have to drop down to the UIKit version for some little thing that Apple couldn't be arsed to port over.”

“SwiftUI became "very good" as of iOS 26 (in part because the performance gap mostly evaporated)”

“There is poor documentation. The biggest trick — small views, think about what values are going to trigger a refresh.”

“SwiftUI is undeniably clean in a lot of ways, it presents beautifully and fits on slides well, but that matters less and less”

“SwiftUI while nice in many ways tries to Reactify native macOS development and made it worse”

“There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store that are 100% SwiftUI. They are real.”

“AI makes up for SwiftUI's biggest weaknesses: Apple's wonky documentation and the need to know when to fall back to AppKit/UIKit.”

“mostly because of the lack of documentation, and the gaps where you still need to drop down to AppKit/UIKit.”

“it's been surprisingly easy to animate things, I've spent way too long trying to synchronize the movement of different components”

“it results in a lot of things just feeling janky, because one-size-fits-all rule and precise polish are fundamentally at odds”

“In my current app, my views are 100% SwiftUI. One of them uses a SwiftUI List which typically has hundreds of thousands of items”

“It's great for test harnesses and admin dashboards, but the apps I make for general end-users are”

“iOS 26 is very late to have acceptable performance in the framework that Apple promotes as what you should use.”

“without deeper knowledge about SwiftUI, I find it a bit odd to expect so much from a novel concept”

“Actually knowing SwiftUI meant it was trivial for me to just close out that remaining 20% by hand”

“There's a lot of realy brilliant stuff in their system frameworks, and in SwiftUI, Cocoa, and UIKit.”

“SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance”

“Cocoa and SwiftUI are more consistent in the sense that a lot of stuff automatically adapts when Apple changes styling”

“Apple has made a similar transition recently from the relatively efficient AppKit/UIKit to the bloated dog that is SwiftUI”

“Apple would turn an LLM loose on the header docs for their SwiftUI codebase. It would drastically improve their docs”

“The APIs seem well thought-out, I needed less code than I would have to do the same thing in React”

“Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on”

“for most things you can build so much with just SwiftUI and a few Apple frameworks”

“Most of the mainstream UI frameworks are under licenses like that and for good reasons.”

“trying to shoehorn good interactivity into a SwiftUI component always ended in horrible code”

“Problem with SwiftUI is that it only works well on macOS 26, maybe one version prior.”

“where it makes sense; often on Apple platforms the imperative frameworks are better suited”

“declarative SwiftUI is used where it's a good fit, which gives you the benefits of both wherever they're needed”

“the most complete UI framework that is native, fast, performant and works very well”

“which is a lot of fun though it did have its share of "gotchas", especially in combo with SwiftData”

“I couldn’t get anywhere with serious Apple platforms development until SwiftUI came along.”