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Before Swift/Kotlin our iOS team was way more productive than android. Everything was done in half the time. They both switched to new languages. Now it has f

• zionic 5y ago
  That's just your team then. Swift is far superior to Objective-C(rap) in terms of both speed and overall productivity.
  • jorgemf 5y ago
    Don't forget kotlin. It is a really game changer.
    • jshier 5y ago
      Yeah, this sounds like a tooling issue. I have no difficultly believing Kotlin + Android Studio might be faster or more reliable than Swift + Xcode. Hard to say with any certainty though, it could be any number of things, if the perceived difference is even real.
      • rapsey 5y ago
        From my outside looking in perspective: * Android studio is reliable and just works. * Kotlin is simple, easy to learn and productive. * xcode is buggy and with their rapid pace of development it is just getting worse. * Swift is complex. They had to rethink and redesign multiple times. Also the language was constantly changing under them.
        • jshier 5y ago
          Swift hasn't changed much in the last 2.5 years, and was stable for the year before that, so it really shouldn't be an issue any more.
          • jorgemf 5y ago
            Yes, but kotlin has been much more stable for more years.
        • pjmlp 5y ago
          > Android studio is reliable and just works. How I wish this would be true. There is a reason why so many rather use InteliJ with Android plugins, or even drop into VSCode with Gradle instead, only starting Studio for workflows that have to be done inside it. There is hardly a "stable" release without regressions.
• kennywinker 5y ago
  I find it hard to believe that anybody is faster coding in objc than swift, if you control for garbage code. It was easy to quickly write buggy messes in objc - swift made that a lot harder, and is also a much more ergonomic and productive language in my experience. I feel like there has to be some other factors at play if that’s the results you’re seeing. (Source: I’ve been doing objc since 2009, and swift since version 1.0)
  • ardit33 5y ago
    A well jelled team, with senior engineers can be much more productive with Objective C. But for beginners, swift looks less intimidating due to its syntax familiarity. The language pitfalls become apparent as you dive into it. Perhaps that’s why swift in ML and other areas failed. People don’t like the language. In iOS you are forced to use it. I hope the swift team does some hard thinking and start slashing features and make it Simpler. What we got is something more complex than even Java. This is the same reason that Scala didn't take off (even though some people like it).
    • jshier 5y ago
      This just isn't true. Given equal familiarity, Swift will be vastly more productive at any skill level. Of course you can always tunnel deeper into more sophisticated solutions using Swift, since Obj-C lacks most of its capabilities, but that's hardly an equal comparison.
      • novok 5y ago
        I have a lot of experience in both languages, and TBH it's just not true. I'm less productive in swift in many ways, mostly because of it's slow build and indexing times. It's infuriating. You are still coding against the same UIKit and other apple libraries in both. SwiftUI has a chance to make it better, but it's incomplete and has bugs/gotchas that make it not as productive as UIKit when you run into that, which is pretty easy. But in an imaginary world where we got ObjectiveSwift instead, SwiftUI could have existed there and given the same productivity benefits. Binary sizes ballooned because of the language. Binaries were significantly smaller in equivalent Obj-C programs than the swift ones, even when the standard swift library was finally baked into the OS.
• dhritzkiv 5y ago
  I've found similar results, although at the end of the day, iOS development is still faster overall. Kotlin does a better job of getting out of the way when you need it to (compared to Swift), and Jetpack Compose is the real game-changer in terms of productivity. That being said, there's a lot that you 'get for free' in iOS' frameworks, and APIs are generally more interoperable / batteries included. Both of these factors are what ultimately speed up iOS development.
  • kitsunesoba 5y ago
    I haven't had a chance to use Jetpack Compose yet but this roughly tracks with my experience. Needing to hunt down third-party libs for everything slows development down considerably and makes for complications down the road when those libraries inevitably stop being supported.
    • dhritzkiv 5y ago
      Totally. To add to this: when looking for third party libraries (Swift/Objective-C or Kotlin/Android Java), aside from those from large organizations (Square, Airbnb, etc.), I've found the selection and quality of those available for iOS to be better, on average.
      • kitsunesoba 5y ago
        Strong agree here. This is also tied into the "batteries included" approach of Apple platforms, because many if not the majority of Swift/Obj-C libraries are mainly wrappers around system frameworks that either bring them to a higher level (in the case of C or C++ APIs) or add a sprinkle of syntactic sugar and light-to-moderate gap filling functionality. So naturally, these libraries are easier to maintain in the long term simply because they're doing so much less.
      • iainmerrick 5y ago
        I think it helps that C and C++ just work on iOS, so you can easily use or wrap existing code in those languages. Unless things have changed a lot recently, C/C++ sort-of-works on Android but it’s a pain to use and the tooling support is very weak.