[GeekyBear]

> 4 iterations later

AppKit (NextStep) has been iterated on for over 30 years now.

Apple's development strategy is like that of old school Microsoft. They make a choice like Win32 and just keep on iterating on it over the long haul. Four years of SwiftUI would still be described as very early days.

Nothing like the development strategy of the week you see Google and the Microsoft of the past decade push as the one true future then abandon almost immediately.

[130e13a]

UIKit after four iterations (i.e., iOS 6 in 2012) was far from its "very early days": it was a well-designed, production-ready, powerful UI framework that was way closer to AppKit than SwiftUI (in its fourth iteration) is to UIKit now.

[GeekyBear]

UIKit started out with more polish because they took the AppKit they had iterated on for so many years and slimmed it down for extremely resource constrained devices.

They weren't starting from scratch.

[WoodenChair]

People were building huge productivity apps on NeXTStep even in the early ‘90s.