SwiftUI After 7 Years

Seven years after its 2019 announcement, SwiftUI has failed to become the production-grade, cross-platform UI development framework Apple had envisioned. The initial excitement surrounding SwiftUI has turned into deep professional frustration for senior engineers, and the framework still suffers from significant issues.

Apple promised SwiftUI would end the era of fighting Auto Layout and rebuilding apps with every minor change. Instead, developers now face a perpetual beta with performance and layout predictability problems, an ever-changing data flow, and a lack of backward compatibility. This shift away from the craftsmanship of the original Cocoa, Aqua, and Auto Layout has led to a modern corporate culture of "good enough" products.

Despite being announced seven years ago, SwiftUI continues to struggle with long-standing issues. Apple's official SwiftUI tutorial, which serves as a first-party example, is broken. Real-world comparisons with UIKit show that SwiftUI often falls short in terms of performance and layout predictability. The data flow in SwiftUI is reactive but often reacts to changes it should ignore, making achieving predictable behavior nearly impossible.

The layout system in SwiftUI is particularly frustrating, with size negotiation causing unpredictable behavior. Custom sidebars are particularly challenging to implement, and developers often have to make concessions to force SwiftUI into working as intended. As a result, SwiftUI still falls short of being a real, production-grade UI framework after seven years.