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by gh123man 1484 days ago
SwiftUI has been a game changer for me as a solo dev. Sure - you have to make tradeoffs like backwards compatibility, and some strange things are missing/don't work. But - it's been a force multiplier. You can break apart complex views into components by copy/pasting its body into a new `View` struct. It's so much simpler than ripping apart a storyboard into a XIB or fighting with layout constraints. The simplicity lets you try things and fail fast without too much of an investment in design complexity.

I find that I can deliver features and iterate much faster and that makes up for the time I spend fixing edge case bugs or bridging to UIKit when I need an unsupported feature.

2 comments

Another solo dev, and I can second your sentiment.

I would like to add that I found SwiftUI to be extremely robust against developer mistakes. Things either work, or they give error messages. It's rare that a view is subtly broken.

I hear you, even though I've chosen to just deal with fighting the layout constraints. For what it's worth, I just use a zillion nested UIStackViews when I'm in "try things and fail fast" mode and it tends to work okay for just seeing if the overall thing works like I want. Then I go back and do more precise design work fiddling with spacing, alignment, compression pressure, etc.