It’s time for SwiftUI

David Koenig
2 min readMar 2, 2021

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When SwiftUI was made by Apple a while ago, my thought was that it would take some time to use it on a day-to-day basis. The idea is only half confirmed, because at the beginning SwiftUI was a bit limited and the second version SwiftUI is still a bit limited, but I also see many advantages.

I’ve been using UIKit for 5 years and I’ve been using Swift for 4 years. The comfort zone is very large to stay with UIKit. But that is exactly what does not make a programmer. It is important to adapt and prepare for the future.

The beginners who start now to learn Swift and SwiftUI have advantages. You don’t have to rethink or rearrange yourself (from UIKit to SwiftUI). On the other hand, the downside is obvious; they are not backward compatible.

As of the current state of the article, the adaptation of iOS 14 is 85% of the devices. Thus, you can reach 85% of users if you program an application exclusively with SwiftUI, but not around 15%.

For me it is important that I reach 100% of the users if possible, which of course is not possible! But none of that stops me from learning SwiftUI. I am not going to turn my back on UIKit entirely, but I will learn and use SwiftUI. At the moment, hybrid (from UIKit & SwiftUI) applications are the rule.

Since Apple has taken this route and the future lies in SwiftUI, I will not fail this one. It keeps me young to learn something new again. I’m curious what I can and will do with SwiftUI.

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