The documentation was absolutely maddening.. Half the time the Apple docs referred to a previous version. “Do this thing in XCode” often included screenshots of UIs that don’t exist in the current version of XCode. Examples I found on Stackoverflow or random blogs were usually no longer applicable.
It felt like magic when it worked, all those VStack HStack nestings, but the annoyance of finding my way there made me seriously doubt whether I’d build a big app with SwifUI, especially if I wasn’t working alone.
> It felt like magic when it worked, all those VStack HStack nestings
EDIT
> made me seriously doubt whether I’d build a big app with SwiftUI
Today I was making a list of reasons/excuses for using Material Design on Mac… which I guess would make some people mad, but it might work for an enterprise product.
That said I did do a fair bit of my own theming. The Flutter Material widgets are actually pretty customizable and I'm not a big fan of vanilla Material.
I’m not in a position to give anyone advice, but I’d love to find SwiftUI but cross-platform and usable from anything other than XCode (well maybe not Ed…) and native GUI and a pony.
For my product I need to support Mac, Windows and eventually iOS/iPadOS. For prototypes iOS is enough. I don’t mind learning new languages for this, but ideally there would be some advantage in knowing the language itself. I’ve been looking at lots of frameworks over the past month.
The most tempting thing so far is Flutter, but I have nagging doubts: because it’s not native UI, I worry about that being a no-go for some large customer down the road, and also about alienating power users. I looked at React Native but it’s not very good for desktop yet as far as I could tell (and the demo app from the documentation doesn’t work, which is a bad sign). Which is too bad because I was impressed with Expo, if I just needed phones I’d probably use that. I looked at Avalonia but it has the opposite problem.
Today I’m looking at Tauri for the Nth time: at least I could improve my Rust, and it seems to have momentum. Doing the UI in a web view is kinda sad, though, after trying SwiftUI.
Just building multiple apps is not realistic, I’m a solo dev and want to get this to market in my lifetime, and it only makes sense if I have both Mac and Windows.
Very happy to hear recommendations from people who have done this!
I'm not convinced many users care that much about this though. They spend most of their day using apps that don't use native controls and I think they're all pretty used to it by now.
I prototyped a bunch of different desktop toolkits and I think that today Flutter is by far the most polished and mature. I've had overall a very positive experience using it for my music app:
The threat of Google canceling it is real though. I suppose if that happens I'll switch to Tauri or just give up on Windows and Android and do SwiftUI. My experiences with SwiftUI to this point have not been very positive though.
Kotlin Multiplatform might also be an option at some point but it doesn't seem that close today. Unfortunately it seems like none of the os vendors are making their desktop APIs a priority these days.
Yeah the Google risk... seems like they came out strong in support of Flutter at their last dev conference, but at the same time it does _not_ look like they're using it for their main apps.
And yes I’d feel more confident in Flutter if Google was dogfooding it a lot more.
> If you really want native look and feel then really your only choice is to use the native toolkits.