This is cool, but there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory.
This has a license: https://github.com/skiptools/skipstone but it vendors the other repo according to the readme? I am super confused about how this would work.
I wish there are something for SwiftUI on Windows. I meant to support Windows for Draw Things, but the opportunity cost is too high without proper UI tooling.
> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge.
I've run into this too with my own app. I thought people would like a Lua GUI framework that's professional grade and gives you full access to WinAPI via Lua. I was using DragonRuby as my model.
So I wasted a thousand hours making the app and its documentation. Turns out, even after people understood what it was (I suck at marketing), everyone still agreed that whatever it could become or ever evolve into was still not worth a dime.
Now I'm faced with a decision. Do I open source it? I think, no. What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.
Then, should I open source it altruistically? What for? First of all, giving things away for free is not inherently good. One negative side effect is teaching people not to rely on their own industry. Another is that they may use it for evil. And then, it feels like such a waste to let the code die out.
The point of open-sourcing is to put it on peoples’ map at all.
Development tools have to be fully dependable (maintained, no rug pull) and proprietary software just carries too much risk in that regard for a lot of people.
The reasoning for making this choice was refreshingly sober and clear-minded. If there was anything that would help tooling reach critical mass, it's turning it into OSS.
I've built with Flutter and React Native a few times over the years, but I will give Skip a go in my next project, I've heard a lot actually.
This is great news, thank you. I have been looking into a way to port Soundscape Community [1], a navigation app for the blind to Android without having two codebases to maintain. Skip looks ideal; I was planning on asking you about licensing for a very small team with almost no funding.
Someone else already asked about talkback accessibility; I assume it will work because it translates to native UI controls on android. Is that correct?
Interesting. I used Expo recently and loved the development experience. I also built a simple iPhone app with Swift, and it was a decent experience. I have plans of building another iPhone app and was considering Swift again, which would make me miss building an Android app, but maybe Skip would allow me to do it anyways.
This is a welcome addition but why should Flutter devs use this ?
Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications.
I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.
Flutter still doesn't support liquid glass on iOS so it doesn't seem like a serious contender to me at this point. And due to the nature of how Flutter is implemented, it's going to continuously be an uphill battle. Maybe it's fine if you intend on having a completely custom UI and don't care about platform look and feel.
See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well.
> near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible)
Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are already starting to feel outdated.
Flutter's grim outlook has resulted in a surge of interest in Skip, and it was one of the drivers for us to open up the platform and catch the wave. If you love Dart, or if your apps don't need to look native (e.g., games or very bespoke interfaces), then Flutter might continue to be acceptable. But everyone else is starting to look elsewhere, especially in cases where their business depends on their apps feeling premium and native.
Dunno about Skip, but I can always tell when an app is Flutter. They feel like crap. Everything's a bit off with the native looking widgets. And fully custom designs still animate a bit weirdly. And they definitely still stutter. Somehow a tier below React Native.
Flutter is fine if you don't care about performance, accessibility, have no need to access native capabilities or non-fluttered widgets (ex: the Google map integration is awful) and overall just want to make an internal app.
The cost of making an excellent flutter app is about the same you'd pay making fully native apps. Except that you're always paying for Skia's costs with Flutter.
This recommends 32GB to run _everything_, so xcode, gradle, emulators, simulators, etc. Not fully surprising.
Thank you for making it open-source (and free!) I looked into Skip before because I’d rather write native Swift than the in-between tangle of code that React Native tends to become. What prevented me from using it was the lack of case studies or apps in production. Has that changed? I looked on the homepage and couldn’t see any. Of course, I understand it might be a growing community and targeted to early adopters for now.
> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge.
This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
This is great news and hopefully makes SwiftUI more feasible as a long term cross-platform UI option.
What would be great is if Apple started working with and contributing to this toolset.
What would be even better is if Apple then open-sourced all (or at least some) of their SwiftUI implementations.
What would be amazing is the community can then takeover some of the issues in SwiftUI – especially on macOS – and help to make it more flexible, feature-rich and comparable to UI toolkits like AppKit.
A good, cross-platform, Swift-based UI toolkit would go a long way to ensuring increasing and enduring cross-platform Swift usage.
Reading about how Skip works made me wonder: how long until we can reliability code only for one platform (e.g. iOS, but also even web) and then have AI agents that translate the code to all the other platforms in truly native code and UI (Swift, Kotlin, etc.)?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadThis is cool, but there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory.
This has a license: https://github.com/skiptools/skipstone but it vendors the other repo according to the readme? I am super confused about how this would work.
Dear lord, what?
I've run into this too with my own app. I thought people would like a Lua GUI framework that's professional grade and gives you full access to WinAPI via Lua. I was using DragonRuby as my model.
So I wasted a thousand hours making the app and its documentation. Turns out, even after people understood what it was (I suck at marketing), everyone still agreed that whatever it could become or ever evolve into was still not worth a dime.
Now I'm faced with a decision. Do I open source it? I think, no. What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.
Then, should I open source it altruistically? What for? First of all, giving things away for free is not inherently good. One negative side effect is teaching people not to rely on their own industry. Another is that they may use it for evil. And then, it feels like such a waste to let the code die out.
But everything eventually goes to waste.
Development tools have to be fully dependable (maintained, no rug pull) and proprietary software just carries too much risk in that regard for a lot of people.
It’s bold to assume people will spend money on something they can’t see in action and don’t know whether it will fit their needs.
I've built with Flutter and React Native a few times over the years, but I will give Skip a go in my next project, I've heard a lot actually.
Someone else already asked about talkback accessibility; I assume it will work because it translates to native UI controls on android. Is that correct?
[1] https://github.com/soundscape-community/soundscape
Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications.
I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.
> near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible)
Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are already starting to feel outdated.
Flutter's grim outlook has resulted in a surge of interest in Skip, and it was one of the drivers for us to open up the platform and catch the wave. If you love Dart, or if your apps don't need to look native (e.g., games or very bespoke interfaces), then Flutter might continue to be acceptable. But everyone else is starting to look elsewhere, especially in cases where their business depends on their apps feeling premium and native.
[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/170310
The cost of making an excellent flutter app is about the same you'd pay making fully native apps. Except that you're always paying for Skia's costs with Flutter.
This recommends 32GB to run _everything_, so xcode, gradle, emulators, simulators, etc. Not fully surprising.
This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
This only works for devs who over time churn out as their app fails or becomes too big [1]
1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/
because after experiencing flutter/RN, crossplatform framework/tools really hard to get right and this is with fb and google resources btw.
sometimes you must really deep in shit and realize that you make mistake to choose these technology
What would be great is if Apple started working with and contributing to this toolset.
What would be even better is if Apple then open-sourced all (or at least some) of their SwiftUI implementations.
What would be amazing is the community can then takeover some of the issues in SwiftUI – especially on macOS – and help to make it more flexible, feature-rich and comparable to UI toolkits like AppKit.
A good, cross-platform, Swift-based UI toolkit would go a long way to ensuring increasing and enduring cross-platform Swift usage.