Brent Simmons on Abandoning SwiftUI for NetNewsWire
Brent Simmons on why they are switching from SwiftUI back to UIKit for the NetNewsWire iOS app:
We’ve been using SwiftUI in NetNewsWire for iOS, for its settings screen and related pieces (such as adding an account).
But now we’re redoing that code in classic UIKit. […]
We very much want to use SwiftUI, and we believe it’s the future of Mac and iOS development — but emphasis should be on future, because it’s not quite ready in the present.
Which should surprise nobody, given that it’s so new. But I thought it might be interesting to know exactly what issues we ran into when using it.
I’m bearish on SwiftUI because I think it’s harder to replace things with something new than people think. The great transition in Apple’s history, from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was to an OS that was in many ways actually even older, based on it’s Unix underpinnings. I don’t see how you can scale up something from scratch to replace frameworks as massive as AppKit and UIKit, but we’ll see.