App development sucks right now. And to be honest, it’s always sucked, but we didn’t know how much it sucked until recently. All you need to know

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2025-01-01 14:30:03

App development sucks right now. And to be honest, it’s always sucked, but we didn’t know how much it sucked until recently.

All you need to know about SwiftUI is that you can do a lot of stuff with a lot less code than before. That’s a great thing for developers on Apple platforms, but an awful thing for everybody else (including users).

Ever since I tried out SwiftUI, I have lost all motivation to use anything else. I have many apps that I would love to port to Android, Windows, and the web. But, making apps for those platforms is completely awful.

Android is getting there in terms of DX with Compose, but Compose feels unfinished and is missing several important features, requiring devs to have to use older, outdated APIs anyways. Also, async/await in Kotlin is so weird! Why does every programming language have to use some weird, strange async/await pattern. This isn’t even just a Kotlin issue. Swift has the same issue! What in the name of god is a MainActor? ModelActor? Huh?!

Windows has like 6+ different frameworks for making apps, and they’re all somehow terrible. It feels like Microsoft constantly realizes “oh no this SDK sucks” and so they start to make a new one, but the new one just ends up having the same problems as the old ones for some reason.