SwiftUI After 7 Years: A Story of Mediocrity
Seven years after its launch, SwiftUI still feels like a perpetual beta, plagued by unpredictable layouts, performance issues, and a chaotic data flow. This deep dive, based on the author's experience, argues that Apple's flagship UI framework has failed to deliver on its promises, forcing developers into a cycle of workarounds and shims. It compares SwiftUI unfavorably to UIKit and points to Apple's own broken tutorial as evidence, while also questioning the company's shift from craftsmanship to a 'good enough' culture.
SwiftUI feels like it’s in a perpetual beta state. Every new feature comes with a fine-print footnote. Every layout fix breaks two more things you didn’t even touch.
- rayiner
The problem with complex systems is that you can be dead long before you realize you're dead. Things can continue to seem "pretty good" for a long time just from the inertia of past good decisions and built-up infrastructure. You see some fraying or cracks but everything looks fundamentally sound, until it isn't.
Apple's inability to deploy a new UI framework that's better than the previous one is troubling. This is the company that shifted from Toolbox to Carbon to Cocoa and each step was better than the last. Could Apple build MacOS X and Cocoa today if they didn't already exist? Microsoft's two decades of failure to ship a true successor to Win32 suggests that Microsoft (at least, the operating system side of the company) died a long time ago. I wonder if we'll say the same thing about Apple 10 years hence.
- sandoze
This seems to be a popular ‘controversial’ topic. I’ve been using SwiftUI for production applications and games since 2021. I drop down UIKit, Metal, or core animation when needed. But that’s no different than when I was making games in UIKit and would drop down to core animation or glyph renderers written in C etc.
Data Flow: The author claims there’s no way to know when things update. Not only does experience help here but there are profile tools that tell you when and where things are updated. This isn’t black magic. Keep Views small, be careful how you hand around data. @environment is super cool but can have a cascade effect. This was greatly improved iOS 17+ and I wouldn’t support anything older than iOS 17.
GeometryReader: Occasionally I’ll use this. It’s kind of a necessary evil when dealing with certain view complexity. It can also be a sign that you’re doing something wrong.
API Stability and performance: Apple users upgrade. There’s no reason that you should be supporting iOS 17 at this point — even iOS 18 is roughly 2%% of our user base across several apps. I’ve been using SwiftUI without major performance issues but I also don’t early optimize. I profile and fix as needed. One of the early studios I worked for wrote all our games in UIKit as prototypes, when performance tanked we’d switch to the appropriate tools (eg. OpenGL) where it was necessary — like in the core game.
I could go on but in the end just use the right tool for the job, if you’re not proficient […]
- cosmic_cheese
I'm sure many will disagree, but I have doubts that pure declarative-reactive is the "right" shape for an all-purpose native UI framework. In my experience, Kotlin+Compose shares many of the same warts… its main redeeming quality is that it's better than Android Framework (most of the time), which is low bar to clear.
These frameworks have a number of good ideas but they don't necessarily combine in a way that transcends high quality traditional imperative frameworks with declarative-reactive bits sprinkled throughout, at least for more complex apps. SwiftUI and its ilk work best for super simple tabs-and-flat-lists sorts of apps.
- spacedcowboy
Apple had a real winner with ObjC and AppKit. Swift is horrendously complicated for the benefits it offers over ObjC, and SwiftUI is a massive step backwards from AppKit.
Just MHO, and it’s not going to stop the juggernaut, but there’s just no appeal in moving there for me :( If (when ?) Apple drop ObjC, that’s the day I move to Linux
- emehex
I've noticed that developers who started with UIKit really have a hard time working with SwiftUI. I think this is because it's not just new syntax, it's an entirely different way to think: state is the source of truth, views are ephemeral, and you describe UI instead of managing it.
- peheje
Despite all the trends, I still really like HTML for structure, CSS for styling, and JavaScript for logic.
The boundaries aren’t perfectly clean, and that’s fine. But the separation gives you a useful way to think: structure this first, style it later, add behaviour where needed.
My experience with Compose—though I suspect SwiftUI people will recognise the feeling—is that I have to think about everything, everywhere, all the time.
Then we add some MVVM/UDF flavour. The "ViewModel" knows nothing about the view, despite usually serving exactly one screen. Add some "MutableStateFlow"s, combine them into "ScreenUiState", expose it as a "StateFlow", collect it with lifecycle awareness.
Beautifully decoupled. Extremely testable.
Then the organisation writes no unit tests and relies entirely on two-hour nightly screen tests.
A welcome-page refactor breaks the profile page.
“Didn’t you check the nightly build?”
No. It runs at night.
“Well, that’s your responsibility.”
But you broke it.
“Yes, but it’s your code.”
Then why did we ship it?
Fine. Schedule the postmortem with my mother.
And I’m not blaming mobile developers here. I’m frontend, backend, full-stack, I think AI engineer now. I have personally helped make simple things complicated across the entire stack.
What I like about the web is that one simple screen can be vanilla JavaScript. Another can use Vue. Another can use some specialised spreadsheet component.
People react to that with horror: what if components are duplicated, […]
- happytoexplain
Autolayout, while flawed like anything else, remains the pinnacle of UI across all platforms.
SwiftUI is a laudable attempt to idiot-proof UI, but it sacrifices too much and ultimately fails.
- slopinthebag
Swift is the worst language I’ve ever used. For context I’ve used everything form JavaScript to C++, and Rust is my choice these days.
Swift feels impenetrable. So much syntax and features that are “progressively disclosed” (horrible UX paradigm btw) but instead just jump at you, breaking threading semantics, and horrible tooling. It’s also the only language I cant* get AI to perform decently well at, a double con.
I hate swift so much.