Thoughts on SwiftUI dev experience

I have just completed a new iOS app and it was my first time using SwiftUI. I have to say the developer experience felt almost... phenomenal... although recently the bar has been pretty low after wrestling with react native!

Specifically the amount of time I spent trying to solve issues that should not be issues, or wrestling with style and layout were essentially zero. The amount of time I spent managing third party code was in the minutes, and the new package manager is simple and forgettable which is exactly how it should be.

I really don’t know what I would say if someone asked me to build a cross-platform app now, I really would be now tempted to build two separate apps. It feels like this app took less than half the time to build than the equivalent in react native, despite spending much of the time learning the new SwiftUI way of doing things. Furthermore, it is stable and looks decent without much extra effort expended - it also feels like the code will last, and not that I will have to spend half a day patching it up if I ever need to add to it.