Swift Android Workgroup | Hacker News Reader

Swift Android Workgroup

swift.org

21 pointsgok8 comments

Something tells me this project has the enthusiasm of an arranged marriage.

Several of the people participating in this are from Skip Tools, which is a product that enables developers to port apps written in Swift and SwiftUI to Android.

I would imagine that it’s quite the opposite, and they are extremely enthusiastic about this.

Also, Apple does have a couple Android apps they’ve written, such as Apple Music, so they probably would like to write some of that code in Swift instead of Kotlin, Java, or C++.

It bears repeating. Apple trying to marry Swift development to a for-profit development product is the last thing the Android developer ecosystem wants. Surely it benefits Apple and the service salesmen at Skip, but Android developers have never wanted for a native Swift runtime; Flutter filled that niche years ago, for free.

Apple ought to just face the music; Swift is an ugly suitor. If there was an appetite for Swift on Android (or any platform, for that matter), we'd have seen results years ago.

Flutter has a lot of issues, it is non-native everywhere, married to Dart which is an even more niche language than Swift, and can have noticeable lag.

At least with Skip your app is completely native on iOS and uses Jetpack Compose on Android.

In my humble opinion, Swift and SwiftUI are better than Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Also, the important parts of Skip Tools are open source.

https://skip.tools/

Maybe they'll ease up with the subscription fees if it catches on, but for an unproven solution with a price tag can't compete with free.

This was really community driven, not by Apple.

The Apple community, clearly. I don't know a single mobile dev who would trade Android Studio for Xcode with a smile, but then again I don't live on the West Coast.

I prefer Xcode to Android Studio. It feels a bit snappier than JetBrains IDEs to me and I find the interface to be more intuitive. The iOS simulator outperforms the Android emulator and Gradle is by far the worst build system I’ve ever used.

However, Visual Studio mops the floor with both.

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