SwiftUI

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “good enough for generating Mac/iOS apps for my personal use in SwiftUI because fuck trying to keep up with Apple's documentation”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-26

• “never had issues doing any design thrown at me using AppKit, UIKit or SwiftUI”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-18

• “oh my aching head, in SwiftUI made me hate those with passion”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-13

• “SwiftUI simply isn't up to the task, except for one very specific, generic layout.”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-10

• “it is writing a lot of SwiftUI without me really knowing the language and doing a fine job as far as I can tell”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-08

• “Using the Visual Code development tools alongside XCode, claude skills and 3rd party libraries and frameworks with SwiftUI and Swift 5/6 is really convincing me I should make apps full time again”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-30

• “SDL3 and SwiftUI both assume they own the app lifecycle. When they coexist on iOS/tvOS/macOS, three specific collisions occur”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-05-29

• “it's disappointing to find out things have not improved with SwiftUI”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-18

• “how bad SwiftUI is, almost a decade later, continuously punches you in the face”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-05-18

• “it's still surprisingly difficult to build what feels like a trivial interface using SwiftUI. Once you get into rich text, selection, streaming updates, syntax highlighting, diffing, or just smooth scrolling, you very quickly end up fighting the framework instead of building the app”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-18

• “SwiftUI falls short, which is also my experience with the framework after using it for many years”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-17

• “You lose many of the native things you get when rendering through SwiftUI primitives”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-17

• “fight the whole SwiftUI model by embedding something like `NSTextView` inside `LazyVStack` / SwiftUI views & then dealing with all the integration problems”

  NEGATIVE · integration · Hacker News · 2026-05-17

• “a lot of realy brilliant stuff in their system frameworks, and in SwiftUI”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-01

• “It felt like the early releases of SwiftUI where you could add a list view but then would run into weird issues as soon as you tried adding stuff to it”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-04-24

• “I've had a great experience working with it on an app that's 97% SwiftUI”

  MIXED · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-21

• “SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-20

• “even capable frontier LLMs still can't write Apple SwiftUI/AppKit properly. They constantly get the bridges wrong, and any feature prompt puts your previous architectural efforts at risk”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-17

• “Catalyst/SwiftUI apps that often don't bother to align drawing to round points”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-03-30

• “I'm going to have an LLM generate the SwiftUI and touch as little of it as possible”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-03-26

• “Native SwiftUI, not Electron. Under 50MB RAM at idle vs 500-800MB for cloud alternatives”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-03-16

• “rendered as native SwiftUI views — much nicer for theming and performance than using a web view”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-03-15

• “written using SwiftUI which gives native performance on macOS”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-03-04

• “They confidently suggest deprecated SwiftUI modifiers, wrong concurrency patterns (actors, Sendable violations, etc.), or APIs that changed in recent betas.”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2025-12-24

• “SwiftUI and the build and deploy process for iPhone apps is so straightforward if you can just paddle around the rocks”

  MIXED · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-09-24