For example, you can't fully customize the NavigationBar or the TabBar directly from SwiftUI. Furthermore, everything that comes in a new version of SwiftUI is incompatible with older iOS versions.Īs you get deeper into the code, you realize that it still depends on UIKit in many situations. SwiftUI only works on devices supporting iOS 13 and above, and it doesn't seem like a big deal today, but in the first 2-3 years after the official launch, it made it difficult for people to adopt it. One of them is the lack of backward compatibility. But what's the catch?Īs with any new framework, there's still room for improvements, and you also must accept some trade-offs. In conclusion, SwiftUI makes it much simpler to get into iOS development and create impressive user interfaces for your apps, even if you don't have too much iOS experience. Whenever something changes, the engine rebuilds the layout, so you don't have to do it manually like before. You now have property wrappers like and observed by your UI components. SwiftUI also has a more reactive approach compared to UIKit, and there are native mechanisms to support that.

It's a step forward from UIKit, which had an interface builder, but you could also modify your UI from code without having the changes reflected on Storyboards or XIB files. You can see in real-time the UI component you're building and run it in a local context. We explored this in more detail in a dedicated article.Īnother great thing about SwiftUI is live previews. Not a big difference, right? It's a huge difference. What we want to build: a reactive label that is automatically updated based on what you type in a text field. The first strong point of SwiftUI seems to be that you can achieve more with less code. Way of use: Programmatically-build UI + Live Previews.We saw that in the last few years, Apple and Google published new declarative-based UI frameworks, promising to improve your app development experience.Īre they ready and worth it? Should you switch to them? This second part dives deeper into the pros and cons of each framework, as well as integration examples and tips. In the first part of this series, we explored the available options for building native mobile app UI for iOS (UIKit and SwiftUI) and Android (XML layouts and Jetpack Compose). If you're looking to build a mobile app in 2023 and beyond, it's crucial to pick the best tools for the job.

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