iOS Is the fat lady about to sing?

[grandM]

I was glancing through app dev vacancies in my country. In summary: java, .net and js. Native Swift? Almost none. Kotlin? Even less.
I agree and am convinced native development is technologically superior. Swift is amazing.
Business owners however seem to be content with non native iOS solutions.
I can imagine the USA differs with the potent apple market share. In Europe however android is king.

If this continues every developer here will go js. Yes, electron apps are gruesome but devs will learn the language leading to a job and Swift is more and more unlikely to do so. In truth apple is partly to blame. Apple devices are too expensive outside the USA. Crossplatform solutions are not discouraged. New API will probably be translated into some react native whatever API.

The stack overflow survey 2021 revealed a staggering 65 percent js and 5 percent Swift devs. But SwiftUI. Yes SwiftUI is shiny new, in the end it will no longer require someone to learn several frameworks as AppKit and UIKit. True. Oh and no more constraints. Do you also know what's true? The View's code merged into that of the VC. It is closures all over the place. A novice probably has no clue what the code means/does he/she codes Text() in and at this stage you must know SwiftUI and UIKit. If Apple manages to break the code at each release and iterates them as fast as Swift, even I will start to consider recommending TypeScript.

Is the future of most app dev coding js? Is Swift to be a niche for huge companies, mainly USA based? What's your take?

 

[Red Menace]

I don’t care for either of them, but I can see web apps becoming the norm - they are cross-platform, run in any browser, don't require an App Store or review process, and can be written as ***tty as you want. Heck, you even have all that juicy ad and tracking crap. The browser runs in a sandbox, so there is (theoretically) no access to anything elsewhere on the machine, so there is your privacy (well, other than the ads and tracking). No more CSAM backdoors or rooting/jailbreak idiocy, just let everyone fight it out off-platform. **drops mic and runs**

 

[grandM]

I am afraid you're right. If rates for native development aren't much higher of those of cross platform development most apps will become non native. Seriously SwiftUI copies react native somehow. Sure SwiftUI performs better but if the hiring companies don't care there be like a few Swift developers creating the JS API. If that 5 percent native devs didn't wake up Apple nothing will. And no, AR won't change that. RN APIs will be created for those neatly designed native APIs taking a performance hit but no-one seems to care. Except for those native devs studying JS and RN because Cupertino is not acting.

 

[firewood]

Maybe for toy apps, JS is OK. But if the business is developing professional tools, CAD, CAE, 3D content creation, audio or photo editing, etc., etc. and doesn't want to rapidly empty the users battery, those apps demand performance that is often not possible in JS.

So the jobs to develop those types of apps often pay more as well. Many of these advanced apps are still partially in C/C++/ObjC, but some are moving to Swift.

 

[redheeler]

I believe web apps are the present future for most heavily client-server apps (eg. social media, messaging, content management, streaming, shopping) as web apps work just fine for that, are easy to package, and can run almost anywhere. But we've yet to see the full potential of technologies like WebGL and WebAssembly for other areas like gaming where native apps still perform much better.

 

[grandM]

Maybe for toy apps, JS is OK. But if the business is developing professional tools, CAD, CAE, 3D content creation, audio or photo editing, etc., etc. and doesn't want to rapidly empty the users battery, those apps demand performance that is often not possible in JS.

So the jobs to develop those types of apps often pay more as well. Many of these advanced apps are still partially in C/C++/ObjC, but some are moving to Swift.

This may be true but what percentage of the job market are we talking about? Plus if these projects are written in Objective-C that pure Swift developer may run into problems. The higher payment is justified as these devs aren't merely producing some table views. Concerning those table views when I talk to business owners eg huge insurance companies they're using JS, also for within the company by the way. I agree these apps often aren't demanding but multibillion companies don't even care for the most performant solution. This worries me.

 

[firewood]

I agree these apps often aren't demanding but multibillion companies don't even care for the most performant solution. This worries me.

I hate to think about all the user battery life wasted, and all the big data centers burning so much energy that it might even impact global climate change, because some clueless company or lazy programmer chose an easy rather than energy efficient (thus usually more performant as well) solution. The energy (and cooling) cost of some big data centers is often far more than the cost of all the racks of hardware (e.g. $Billions)

 

[grandM]

I hate to think about all the user battery life wasted, and all the big data centers burning so much energy that it might even impact global climate change, because some clueless company or lazy programmer chose an easy rather than energy efficient (thus usually more performant as well) solution. The energy (and cooling) cost of some big data centers is often far more than the cost of all the racks of hardware (e.g. $Billions)

I agree with you. The vacancies and stack overflow survey don't lie. In my country Swift is no longer taught.

 

[firewood]

Stanford is still teaching CS193p (with SwiftUI). Last I checked, the course was still quite popular.

 

[grandM]

Stanford is still teaching CS193p (with SwiftUI). Last I checked, the course was still quite popular.

Yes, Swift seems to become a USA thing unfortunately. Kotlin isn't doing great either. Makes you wonder.

 

[AdonisSMU]

Yes, Swift seems to become a USA thing unfortunately. Kotlin isn't doing great either. Makes you wonder.

Most of the software is old. Until performance on the web becomes an issue things will remain the same.

 

[firewood]

This may be true but what percentage of the job market are we talking about?

The percentage that has customers willing to pay big-bucks for apps. Makes any programmers willing and skillful enough to work with that type of code more valuable. Supply and demand.

 

[grandM]

The percentage that has customers willing to pay big-bucks for apps. Makes any programmers willing and skillful enough to work with that type of code more valuable. Supply and demand.

The commuting is often the problem with these scarce jobs.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

My company has native Android and iOS apps. The Android app is in Kotlin, and the iOS app is in Swift/UIKit.

Kotlin is a disaster, and I feel like I'm constantly fighting with it. Granted it could be our dependency on Dagger that I'm fighting, but the tooling should be mature and it's not.

On the iOS side, Swift is nice. UIKit is tolerable. I tried making a personal project using the cross-platform mac/iOS SwiftUI app. Holy moly is it bad. Simple things like an alert (in JS, alert("Hello World")) are tied to UIs, and making an alert from a helper is impossible without compiler #if statements.

I'm just annoyed at how separate the two platforms are, despite them supposedly being ready for "cross-platform". The whole situation is as bad as Windows 8's universal app situation was, where they were "universal" only if you didn't want to make an app with any sort of utility.

 

[Red Menace]

I think in this case "cross platform" just means you can use the same tools across platforms. The platforms themselves usually have different APIs, which means compiler directives/wrappers or a separate app.

 

[newbmacuser2021]

Sarcasm Post:

Sure, I’ll just quit working on Android for poor people to spend a month optimizing the Photos apps for your iPhone 13 Pro Max so your 12 MP Ultrawide Live Photos look a bit smoother on 120hz.