[mbjdesign]

The indictment here that Agilebits was willing to go above and beyond to maintain native code on both iOS and macOS yet couldn’t justify it even after going all-in on SwiftUI for iOS is striking. It demonstrates just how hard cross-platform is and how far off Apple are with getting SwiftUI to ubiquity.

[jillesvangurp]

It's not cross platform if all it does is IOS and mac. Apple doesn't want cross platform on any other platforms than their own. However, many app developers have to worry about windows, Android, IOS, Mac, Web. Very few organizations are willing to have dedicated platform specific teams and want to deal with keeping multiple such teams aligned.

Apple's strategy of raising the walls around their walled garden ever higher might at some point backfire. There's a bit of a vacuum in the market currently with react native and flutter being the main incumbents for cross platform. However both have their limitations.

The holy grail here is something that works on all platforms that does not require huge efforts to tailor to any specific platform. WASM is potentially shaking up this space in the next few years with applications like Figma offering a very slick experience that is mostly not based on DOM trees or other traditional web stuff. Other factors are the weakening of the Android platform in e.g. China where several phone manufacturers are locked out of that ecosystem. Many app developers need to cover all these bases.

I kind of like what Jetbrains is doing here with their multi platform Kotlin strategy. There are a lot of pieces coming together to target cross platform UI development in the next few years. They already took Jetpack Compose and made web and desktop versions of that available recently. Really all that's missing now is an IOS version (they already do mac desktop). And since it's all Kotlin, the ecosystem overlaps with the Android one in terms of libraries and skills needed. They are also working on a WASM backend for the Kotlin compiler.

[mbjdesign]

'Cross-platform' in the sense that it has to accommodate mobile and desktop which is certainly one of the hardest bits of cross-platform. I know true cross-platform is infinitely harder because the differences go all the way through the OS and down to CPU architecture.

I too would like to see where WASM can go. I think that combined with cross-platform "cores" like Agilebit's use of Rust could be a very viable solution longterm.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

>going all-in on SwiftUI

That was mistake number 1.