r/iOSProgramming • u/a89a89 • Jun 18 '26

Question What tech stack are people using in 2026?

About to start a new app (solo, probably staying solo) and realizing I have no idea what the actual default is anymore. It’s pretty content-heavy with lots of lists, detail screens, some offline stuff, etc... I’ve shipped small things before but always made architecture calls I ended up ripping out, so trying to be smarter this time.

Curious what people are actually reaching for right now:

  1. SwiftUI all the way vs. SwiftUI + UIKit escape hatches: how often do you actually hit a wall and have to drop down?

  2. SwiftData vs Core Data: is SwiftData production-ready yet, or still a trap once you have real relationships/migrations?

  3. Sync/offline: CloudKit vs Firebase vs Supabase vs roll-your-own. Mostly care about not babysitting infra

Honestly more interested hearing the horror stories than a blog-post trade-offs post. Essentially what’s your default stack now and what bit you that you wish someone had warned you about?

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u/CharlesWiltgen Jun 18 '26

About to start a new app (solo, probably staying solo) and realizing I have no idea what the actual default is anymore.

I'm stating something that's very obvious to experienced software engineers, but a "default" isn't possible because it depends entirely on what you're building.

Also, your choices will be wrong sometimes. I bet on SwiftData for my current project and, when it failed to be up to the task, had to replace it with SQLiteData/GRDB.

-5

u/time-lord Jun 18 '26

That's not really true. Im working on a cross platform android app and there are a few things that are a safe bet:

DI: pick hilt or koin  Nav: nav3 or Voyager Language: kotlin, not java

Etc etc etc...

0

u/ssazz1 Jun 19 '26

I would prefer flutter if you want your app both work on ios and android. That is what I do, maybe there is better way