Is it really foss?

Joachim (@[email protected])

I think I just figured out why I (and I think several other #iOS developers who have used #UIKit before) have developed somewhat of an animosity against #SwiftUI: SwiftUI makes simple things really simple. It also makes some very specific complex things simple. But despite the theoretically really high customizability (it’s all custom views with lots of modifiers overall), that‘s at first glance much higher than UIKit, getting things *just right* and creating a solution that feels just *excellent* is really hard. And by now I’m convinced that creating excellent solutions that really fit in well with the OS and offer a great, frictionless UX to people using your app is *harder* in SwiftUI. However, creating a solution that works and is good enough is *easier* in SwiftUI. With it you fairly quickly arrive at a solution where it’s hard to argue that the small pieces of friction, the slight irregularities in the UI, the bits where people can accidentally „hold it wrong“, that these things should be removed. I believe these bits of friction occur more often in SwiftUI and are harder to remove than in UIKit. Add to that the higher initial cost of getting a working solution in UIKit at all and this *strongly* tips the balance in favor of „good enough“ UX when using SwiftUI, and away from excellent UX. And I hate that about SwiftUI.