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That's a little more ambiguous. Until very recently I was primarily a Cocoa developer (took a full time iOS dev job a few months ago), and it still makes up a s

That's a little more ambiguous. Until very recently I was primarily a Cocoa developer (took a full time iOS dev job a few months ago), and it still makes up a significant portion of my side work, so I'm biased. But right now, the alternatives are SwiftUI and UIKit/Catalyst. SwiftUI nicely integrates with AppKit/Cocoa, but anyway, it's in pretty rough shape on the Mac at the moment (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24472063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24472063 for example). Catalyst is (IMO) basically garbage if your goal is to make a great Mac app. Its purpose is to allow easy porting from iOS to Mac, not to create truly good Mac apps. Obviously, the presence of these two technologies, and Apple's pushing them is evidence that Cocoa may be on its way out, but it's not deprecated, and is still officially the recommended way to build true Mac apps. Undoubtedly it's SwiftUI (not Catalyst) that will eventually displace it, but especially on the Mac, SwiftUI is not really ready for production yet.

pier25 6y ago
I agree with all your points. I considered getting into Cocoa dev but between the lack of resources and the probability that Apple will kill it in the not so distant future, it didn't make much sense. Better wait a couple of years until the mud settles.
- armadsen 6y ago
  I think that's eminently reasonable. As someone with 15 years experience doing Cocoa dev, the intention to be a Mac dev indefinitely, and hundreds of thousands of lines of existing Cocoa and Cocoa Touch code, it's just going to be a slow transition. But there's no pressing reason to just stop writing any new Cocoa code (I literally wrote some since my last comment :-P). If I were starting now, I'd probably focus on SwiftUI with the assumption that it will be the way to start most new projects within the next few years.

pier25 6y ago

I agree with all your points. I considered getting into Cocoa dev but between the lack of resources and the probability that Apple will kill it in the not so distant future, it didn't make much sense. Better wait a couple of years until the mud settles.

armadsen 6y ago
I think that's eminently reasonable. As someone with 15 years experience doing Cocoa dev, the intention to be a Mac dev indefinitely, and hundreds of thousands of lines of existing Cocoa and Cocoa Touch code, it's just going to be a slow transition. But there's no pressing reason to just stop writing any new Cocoa code (I literally wrote some since my last comment :-P). If I were starting now, I'd probably focus on SwiftUI with the assumption that it will be the way to start most new projects within the next few years.