SwiftUI Still Isn’t Production-Ready
Not for the reasons you might think!
--
SwiftUI is simply fantastic. It’s a great way of producing applications quickly, and seems to be the future for creating iOS applications. Previews are fantastic, and the speed of production seems unparalleled.
We see Apple producing many tutorials and WWDC videos based on SwiftUI. It’s rather fantastic how the community is building around the technology.
So we should press delete on our project, and start again next Monday — right?
Let’s take a look at some of the main reasons to be wary of SwiftUI in 2022. A complete argument for you to present to your CTO? Nah. A whistle-stop tour of some things to think about. Yup!
A memory leak? No problem.
Imagine using a version of Xcode with a major memory leak attached to SwiftUI. If it’s Xcode 13 I think that’s fine, they’ll fix in in 13.1. What do you mean, they only fixed it in Xcode 13.2.1?
If it’s a show-stopper for you perhaps you’ll take this one seriously. Or at least those months seriously.
I wonder if in the comments I’m going to be told that I shouldn’t use Geometry Reader. I don’t use Geometry Reader (I do use Geometry Reader).
Apple think it’s ready
Apple are using it in their own Apps! Yes, I believe the calculator App is SwiftUI. I believe the translator App is SwiftUI. Other Apps? They’re mostly Objective-C, and this tells you much about Apple internally doesn’t it?
UIKit is not going away
When we move away from a technology we are not necessarily leaving a technology behind. For some projects it might make sense for the project to be created using a well-documented technology which (deep breath) is still in development.
