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7 Years of release on Swift UI, 12 years for Swift.

This isn't 7 years of development, but 7 - 12 years after release. And to most these past 7 - 12 years are an ongoing beta development. It is unfinished, unpolished with no end in sight. And I have been extremely critical since the beginning.

But the problem runs much much deeper. It isn't the technology that is the problem, not the devs who are making it. It is the person making the decision as to WHY this was allowed from the get go. WHY this was allowed to be released, or even before all that WHY resources for development of these ideas were allowed in the first place.

For every yes that are a thousand no. Instead a lot of Apple's software development can be summarised as resume or KPI bonus driven development. It is not as bad as Google and Microsoft, but it is clear Apple have this problem a well.

If you look back into Jobs era of Apple software, ( and not just software ) Apple manage to have done most things 2x better with half the resources. The whole Apple now is bloated. And yet everyone is chanting Craig Federighi all the way.

And it is funny because for the vast majority of these 7-12 years I was the only few on HN and Twitter that was extremely skeptical of it, to the point I gave up writing ( or ranting ) about it before majority Swift and Swift UI developers negative sentiment emerged.

And I have often asked the same question every single time, what if they just spend one fifth of the resources to iterate and improve C / Objective-C and Cocoa. All the resources on Swift and everything adjacent to it could have been better spent somewhere else.

I have high hope for John Ternus, hopefully he gets his political game right and manage to change course for Apple software somewhere down the line.

5 comments

I agree with you. Swift should have been a modernized Objective-C. It should have kept the best parts of it, which made it a joy to use, and leave the archaic and the weird things behind.

it would have been a great language, meanwhile they decided to throw everything out and created a language that it is overcomplex, and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem. Basically, if you weren't required to use it, nobody would, which makes it a failure.

SwiftUI, should have been a rendering template/library integrated with UIKit. Also, cleaning up some of the UIKit syntanx and framework (simplifying it), and use SwiftUI as a template for UI, would have been ideal.

SwiftUI instead was pitched as replacement, yet it is not near as capable as UIKit, and it is not feature parity even 7 years later.

Just bad leadership by Apple in this case. (probably many of these decissions were 'promo / resume padding driven' as it happens in many large companies).

While reading this comment, two of Steve Job's line pops up in my head. I think it was the Apple Park opening, and Steve response to insult in WWDC 199x.

> "We need to be true to ourselves, and remember what is important, that is what going to keep Apple Apple, is if we keep us, us."

> "You have got to start with the customers experience and work backwards to the technology.

Right now it feels a lot like Apple without Steve Jobs the first time round. On paper there are a lot of cool tech being worked on. But in the end it was tech from NeXT that really shines.

And a lot of these tech don't actually benefits the customers. If the choice was a language and framework that is slightly harder to developers but brings overall higher quality Apps because the barrier is higher. Compared to a language that wants to replace Assembly to Javascript while being easy to learn like Visual Basic and for everyone to code. I would much rather pick the former.

Edit: I suddenly remember I also submitted a Core Animation introduction video from Steve a while ago on HN [1]. 20 years later we have gone backwards on a lot of things.

[1] https://x.com/lucaslovexoxo/status/2082098579632783441

I remember this video, from way back. Then, it was impressive, but it also felt logical that machines of that era were able to do it. So it wasn't magic. Just good engineering. Now everything is jank & stutter and my 64GB 25 times more powerful machine just refused to play back a YouTube video in my Safari tab since I have too many windows open.

My iPhone 16 Pro is the jankiest user experience I’ve had on a new iPhone ever. On my Mac the settings app pauses and stutters. Jobs would have thrown things if he ever saw this.

I knew Apple was lost when they dropped the “Home” button, just after spending a $1B to build a Palo Alto headquarters in the shape of the “Home” button.

I suggest reading Steve Jobs biographies regarding those kind of expenses at Apple, Pixar and NeXT.

What would the biographies say? He opposed them?

My base 2019 macbook pro 15 on Mojave is actually faster than new macbook pros today on some tasks.

There’s no way Apple doesn’t know about that internally. So I don’t see any other explanation… other than a lack of care, or a bozo explosion.

Which tasks ? I don't believe your claims.

If you dont believe me… nobody is stopping you from testing various things on the same model?

And if you dont have it already… then what could I possibly say that would motivate you to buy a used one to do the testing to confirm?

Edit: And even on my ipad pro m2 doing literally nothing other than swiping to the app library often causes a visible stutter and lag for hundreds of miliseconds… so if you really think it’s flat out impossible to find consistently slower things on the much more complex macos… idk what to say.

Why should I need to do any testing ? I'm just going to keep on not believing you until you back up your claims.

And your iPad example doesn't make sense at all, you compared 2 Macbooks and now you're talking about another OS altogether.

> idk what to say.

You could just tell us one example of something that's faster on your 2019 Macbook Pro 15 versus a M5 Macbook pro and how to reproduce it.

You’re shifting the burden of proof. You made a claim and refused to substantiate it in any way whatsoever.

I completely agree. Apple went from making “wow” products to “meh” products. Everything started to decline after Steve passed away.

> Swift should have been a modernized Objective-C. It should have kept the best parts of it, which made it a joy to use, and leave the archaic and the weird things behind.

That's what Objective-Smalltalk is, or rather, what it started out as.

https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objectiv...

It has now gone further to actually implement Brad Cox's idea of a "Software IC", by taking on ideas from software architecture and metaobject protocols.

https://2024.splashcon.org/details/splash-2024-Onward-papers...

> SwiftUI, should have been a rendering template/library integrated with UIKit.

Do you mean it should have used some sort of XML-ish/HTML-ish templating mechanism? For Interscript, I keep looking at that approach, but so far haven't gone down that road (except for HTMXNative, but there it actually is HTML, so...).

I wrote something similar a couple years ago too after having a pretty bad time with swift ui and concurrency: https://medium.com/goodones/pareto-optimal-apple-devtools-b4...

> it would have been a great language, meanwhile they decided to throw everything out and created a language that it is overcomplex, and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem. Basically, if you weren't required to use it, nobody would, which makes it a failure.

Which means Objective-C was a failure, right?

Since macOS and iOS would not exist without Objective-C, the answer is No, it was not a failure.

This does not answer my question.

> and leave the archaic and the weird things behind.

The number one archiac/weird thing was message passing instead of methods. Number two was square brackets for message passing.

What would be left of Objective-C once these were left behind?

> and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem.

Objective-C was on a path to gain serious traction outside of the Apple ecosystem?

Forcing Swift instead of Objective C caused the good programmers to leave, and attracted the mediocre developers

So just like Objective-C?

Rescued by NeXT's acquisition, having failed to gain market adoption otherwise.

The Objective C at StepStone was completely different than the one at NeXT. It was very primitive. Steve Naroff did pretty much all of the heavy lifting, and turned Objective C into a language that could be used to create NeXTStep, and then OS X, and eventually iPhone.

> Instead a lot of Apple's software development can be summarised as resume or KPI bonus driven development. It is not as bad as Google and Microsoft, but it is clear Apple have this problem a well.

When did the term “KPI” come into use at Apple? I’m aware it was used in management circles decades ago but I don’t remember it being so common say in 2005. The underlying concept is sound, but the problem with abstracting it under an acronym is that it treats KPIs as somewhat fungible regardless of importance. It’s like “lines of code” as a productivity measure all over again.

My opinion is that good old UIKit based on MVC (Model-View-Controller) is simply excellent for building scalable, complex and performant UI's in traditional, compiled languages. The declarative, state-driven UI works wonderfully on the small keynote-demo scale but needs a specialized language to support it on the large scale. Otherwise you waste a LOT of time debugging.

And Swift is simply just not that language. Apple should have just invented a specialized UI DSL to support SwiftUI. And continued to support good old MVC first-class. Explicit Constraints, Lifecycle Clarity and Programmable Control make UIKit apps easier to debug and fix.

SwiftUI should cleanly extracted out its reactive framework as a standalone, public framework for non-UI or decoupled use-cases. That would have helped in fixing a lot of issues.

I left Swift and SwiftUi behind be 5 years ago when I switched jobs. I had fond memories and always eyed going back.

What were the emerging problems that you talk about? I am actually curious because I was quite fond of the DevEx

It only worked that way for Steve Jobs, because under him, as it was at NeXT as well, either you dedicate your life to the cause, or go work elsewhere.