Apple's SwiftUI still feels like a beta after seven years, developer critique says

Seven years after Apple announced SwiftUI as the future of app development across its platforms, the framework still feels like a perpetual beta, developer video channel Code Bird argues in a long critique titled "SwiftUI After 7 Years: A Story of Mediocrity".

Data flow and layout

SwiftUI was unveiled in 2019 with promises of declarative syntax, a single source of truth and instant previews. State management has shifted from @State and @Binding wrappers to the Observation framework and the @Observable macro — yet, the author says, it is still hard to know how often a view updates, or why. Layout, built on size negotiation, still breaks floating views and custom sidebars; Apple's own tutorial project shows a faulty sidebar when built with the latest Xcode, a bug he first noticed more than two years ago. Developers end up wrapping views in a GeometryReader, which he calls "the ultimate admission of defeat".

APIs and compatibility

Modern SwiftUI code is full of if #available checks, the essay notes: dismissing the keyboard on scroll required iOS 16, toolbar customisation arrived only a few years ago, and AsyncImage shipped in iOS 15 — while the request-based API that supports caching is still in beta as of July 2026. Some components were renamed or replaced, such as the buggy NavigationView giving way to NavigationStack, which forces parallel code paths for older systems. Unlike Jetpack Compose on Android, which is bundled with the app and still runs on devices from 2014, SwiftUI cannot back-deploy its newest APIs.

Performance and the cross-platform promise

In a head-to-head image-grid test against UIKit on an older iPhone, the author found SwiftUI scrolling noticeably less smooth, even with background-thread image decoding applied. The cross-platform pitch is overstated too: "learn once, apply anywhere" often becomes "learn once, learn twice, apply somewhere, debug everywhere", because iOS knowledge rarely transfers to Mac layouts. "SwiftUI is not truly bad. It's mediocre. And that, in my opinion, is much, much worse," the author concludes, saying he still prefers UIKit and AppKit.