HACKER Q&A
📣 mraison

Should I use SwiftUI or UIKit for a new iOS app in 2020?


My company [1] has been developing an iOS app for a few months and want to launch in the fall. We’ve been using React Native for prototyping, but decided to go fully native moving forward (our usage of custom native modules played a part in that decision). We're really on the fence regarding which UI framework to choose. What's your experience? What would you do in our situation? Would you pick one over the other? Use a little bit of both?

Relevant context:

• we're starting from scratch (no legacy codebase)

• only supporting iOS 13+ is fine

• execution speed matters, but we care deeply about UX and we're playing the long game

• we're mostly "full stack" devs, although we are actively looking for an iOS engineer

[1] https://www.nabla.com/

  👤 ceocoder Accepted Answer ✓
Hey Martin, I was looking into this to understand current landscape of iOS development. Found this[0] very detailed post about SwiftUI vs UIKit - HTH. When you do decide, do you mind posting about your decision and rational as well? In addition what made you decide against ReactNative and going fully native?

[0] https://medium.com/@SteelKiwiDev/swiftui-vs-uikit-benefits-a...

👤 ar7hur
I'm also wondering if it's more strategic to have the top level (navigation etc.) in SwiftUI and lower levels in UIKit, or the reverse?
👤 cordic_rpn
For your company, SwiftUI no brainer. Regards to Yann if he ever drops by your Paris office. Anonymous with a long long experience in iOS.