> You could write an opposite article featuring people using SwiftUI that have never touched UIKit or iOS code before and it would be nothing but glowing praise.

How can one properly evaluate it with no point of comparison?

If you've never tasted chocolate, then vanilla might seem like the greatest flavor ever.

The point of comparison is that it has given people the ability to develop their own iOS apps from scratch, when previously they could not as UIKit was too daunting and the tools were not as advanced (live preview with swiftui/etc).

It may have a easier ramp-up, but it also has a huge cliff at the end of the ramp. Once you step off the happy path you're in for an even more daunting experience than UIKit, because SwiftUI doesn't give you much to get below the magic when you need to. Also, previews are fairly constantly broken in my experience. Interface builder has its problems too, but at least it renders the nib every time.

SwiftUI is not less daunting than UIKit. In fact I would say that the SwiftUI "magic" is far scarier for beginners than IBOutlets and UIViewControllers

I watched a youtube video about VStacks and Spacers and I was having fun making real layouts my first hour in - with a fast, live preview environment. That was my "oh wow" moment. What's the equivalent with UIKit? Interface Builder is nothing like what's now possible with SwiftUI. I've tried IB in the past and it was not for me.

> What's the equivalent with UIKit?

UIStackView

> I was having fun making real layouts my first hour in

Good. Now take a pixel-perfect mockup of a new screen from your designer at work and implement that.

UIStackView is much more boilerplate to use than just a HStack/VStack. And I do a lot of design work in SwiftUI–it's really easy to get stuff on the screen and directly how you want it to look, even for a design mockup. I'll just not hook up interactivity and it works just fine for that kind of storyboarding. If you have a designer that wants you to follow their lead "to the pixel" then they're probably not doing their job of UI design very well–a good process works both ways, where you provide insight into what works well on the platform and they provide their own suggestions until you meet in the middle.

Then again, you can eliminate a lot of that boilerplate. I have a demo app up where I generate UIViews using resultBuillder such that you get a very SwiftUI-like experience using UIKit views.

https://github.com/hmlongco/Builder

> UIStackView is much more boilerplate to use than just a HStack/VStack.

It is. It's also far more flexible in return.

But the point is that if someone has to ask this question then they don't have enough experience with UIKit to be comparing SwiftUI and UIKit.

> Good. Now take a pixel-perfect mockup of a new screen from your designer at work and implement that.

I'm also a designer and have built many detailed screens with custom components/interactions in SwiftUI.

I have been watching your progress on Stocketa and as an experienced iOS engineer who uses SwiftUI at work, I have been amazed by the speed with which you were able to build the app. The fact that you were able to ship a real app (with custom graph and polished animations) really speaks to how accessible SwiftUI is to new developers compared to UIKit.

I work for mid size company with a fairly big app with millions of users and we did a complete re-write of the app in SwiftUI and I can say with confidence that once a SwiftUI view layer is built out, building features on top of that is incredibly fast compared to UIKit.

Beginners love magic, it lets them do things they otherwise couldn't do.

I don't agree, magic is confusing and scary. Especially in SwiftUI where it literally looks like it's invalid syntax if you're used to basic Swift.

>(live preview with swiftui/etc)

I have a similar experience (started working from scratch on an iPhone app back in January with SwiftUI). Live preview is really awful. I had to basically disable it throughout my project. It'll crash for no reason and require a manual click on a button to reload, errors it spits out tend to be unintelligible, etc. I definitely wouldn't use live preview as an example of SwiftUI being advanced and not being daunting to use.

Fair enough. In fairness to the blog author, iOS developers with more experience are more likely to be known to him and others.

It's quite a bit different experience working on an app by yourself and working on an app that has several hundred thousand lines of code that 10+ people are working on simultaneously. I've worked with a bunch of people that are complaining in this and the problems you face are quite a bit different.

Your app looks sharp though I like it.