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You think the Mac version of Messages was ported via Catalyst two years ago and it’s a dead end? I don’t.

• wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Hi John, I appreciate your article/writing. I understand the perspective however I believe there's a case to be made that Catalyst is a temporary transitional tech that Apple themselves used to avoid waiting on SwiftUI native maturity which has been slow going. So many issues between the largely UIKit vs AppKit backend implementations, lots of surprising behaviors with macOS native SwiftUI still. But these are surprises for developers, and it seems clear to me that there are limits to how macOS native feeling Catalyst has been spec'd in ways that are more apparent to users wit less recourse for devs to compensate. Messages benefits from having more custom components already with its own UI. This is my take as someone who's intensively explored both options and been building in SwiftUI for a couple years. Sorry for vague references off hand. Best luck with Wavelength, it's very nice.
  • borland 4y ago
    There's more to an app than just the UI layer; Catalyst helps with not only the UIKit parts, but other surrounding stuff like app launching, integration with system features (sharing etc) which differ between mac/iPhone, and other things like that. It holds value even if you wrote all your UI in SwiftUI. Whether it's a dead-end technology or not, only apple knows (and they won't tell us), but SwiftUI alone doesn't remove the need for it.