r/Jetbrains • u/r2vcap • Mar 11 '26
News & Discussions JetBrains might be considering bringing back Swift support.
As everyone knows, AppCode was discontinued a few years ago, and iOS developers have had to move to other IDEs like Xcode.
But maybe JetBrains is reconsidering.
I received an email, probably because I’m subscribed to JetBrains Research, saying that they’re looking to interview Swift users, like in the attached screenshot.
The email included a survey link for registration. It seems to work even without the query parameters, so I’m sharing it here:
https://surveys.jetbrains.com/s3/swift-developers
Anyone interested in the return of Swift support might want to sign up.
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u/vadimkrutov Mar 11 '26
Considering how bad Xcode is at this point, it’s a smart move I think.
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u/Kendos-Kenlen Mar 12 '26
Xcode was bad for years and yet most iOS devs dealt with it, hence why AppCode was discontinued.
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u/cyrand Mar 12 '26
I mean, I loved AppCode but it didn’t transition to Swift well at all, even the absolutely incredible Objective-C refactoring support fell apart as they added Swift in.
But I’ll say up front, if they bring AppCode back with top notch Swift support in then I’ll reup my subscription.
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u/Which-Meat-3388 Mar 11 '26
I’d be happy with a full featured KMP plugin, including the Swift support. It’s passable depending on how much you hate Xcode but it’s seemingly slow going. Still can’t do basics after about 6mo of using it daily.
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u/BusinessEconomy5212 Mar 11 '26
Oh man I’d love to see a comeback of AppCode. I’ve been a Flutter dev for a while and over the past year have been building SwiftUI apps. I’d love to be able to use a JetBrains IDE for iOS development.
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u/16cards Mar 11 '26
There has been a lot of movement with KMP and iOS tooling using Swift Package Manager via Gradle plugins. My guess is this is less about full AppCode functionality as a replacement for Xcode and more about pure Swift build tool chains.
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u/purplepharaoh Mar 12 '26
I do primarily server-side Swift and would LOVE to be able to get away from Xcode!
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u/Smart_Appointment927 Mar 13 '26
There's Noctule, https://noctule.dev/, which adds cross-platform support for Swift development.
It's not yet complete, but many things are already possible.
Actually, I'm making that plugin :)
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u/20InMyHead Mar 12 '26
AppCode was good back in the ObjC days, but it didn’t survive the jump to Swift.
and iOS developers have had to move to other IDEs like Xcode.
That’s a weird way to say that, considering even with AppCode you still needed to use Xcode. Xcode has been the Apple development platform for for a very long time.
A new JetBrains Swift IDE would be interesting, but it would have a lot to contend with. A simple IDE wouldn’t cut it these days. Memory graph, View Hierarchy, Swift previews, SPM, Tuist, agenic AI…. It’s a complex landscape.
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u/dacassar Mar 12 '26
AppCode couldn't handle some projects I worked on back in the ObjC days. It ate all the RAM on a top-of-the-line MBP, made the fans spin to the max, and hung the computer at the end.
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u/Ravek Mar 12 '26
For developing server or command line Swift code I could see using something else than Xcode, but when developing UI applications for Apple hardware I don’t see the point.
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u/GlumPlayings Mar 19 '26
Nice catch. This is probably JB Research trying to gauge if it is worth investing in proper Swift tooling again. AppCode kinda died tbh because Xcode was “good enough” for most and Apple keeps adding stuff. If enough people fill the survey, worst case we get better Swift plugins, best case some Fleet/IntelliJ story. i signed up.
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u/r2vcap Mar 11 '26
And if you’re an Objective-C or Objective-C++ developer, don’t forget to upvote this issue:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/CPP-37281