I would like to share my experience and some resources i believe might be helpful in this blog post, but I want to make it clear that it should not be taken as a standard or guide for everyone to follow. As individuals, we all have unique experiences that shape our perspectives on things as what i will share is from my experience so far.
However, this post will focus strictly on SwiftUI learnings and provide some resource links that I have come across and found helpful either through listening or learning from them.
iOS Development with Swift programming language developed by Apple is an exciting way to build for phones, desktops or other platforms, however for this post, i will be focusing on its use case in combination with SwiftUI to develop native iPhones & iPad mobile applications.
For developing mobile applications, there are either the cross or hybrid approaches which means developing iOS and Android apps from one codebase like Flutter, React Native, ionic and others however, there is also the second approach which is developing mobile platforms natively.
In simple terms, to develop native means you are building strictly for only one platform operating system and will make use of the technologies developed by the platform which gives you access to all available APIs.
Admittedly, there are advantages and disadvantages to both, i guess at the end of the day, it entirely depends on your interest and approach to what you will be working on.
For native iOS development, there are also two methods to building a native iOS mobile app, with UIKit or SwiftUI, what's the difference?
Primarily, from my experience so far, the difference lies in their frameworks and their user interface build.
UIKit is the OG to SwiftUI, so basically it has been around more, most apps currently in the market run on UIKit (And by most apps, i mean native iOS apps). So technically UIKit has most of the foundation technologies making customizing your app’s user interface ‘slightly’ programmatically advanced.
SwiftUI on the other hand, released in about 2019 is the successor to UIKit and unlike the former, SwiftUI makes the process of developing apps more focused on layouts and component-based making it visually exciting and ultimately write less code.
As a product designer choosing between both was a no brainer for me as SwiftUI made me feel as though i was still within Figma. It felt natural and close to the functions available on Figma and my knowledge of CSS.
With SwiftUI, i think about it like an input-output where you get to see in real time how the code you are writing is visually playing out, for me this was the big difference that made me go with SwitUI alongside Apple’s goal of making the latter the new standard of apps development.