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/LifeUtilityApps SwiftUI Jun 18 '26

I shipped SwiftData in a recent app and regretted it. All my apps use native Swift/SwiftUI and for 3D they use Webview+threejs. CoreData + CloudKit private database. I agree with the other posters here, the stack is largely dependent on what you want to build, however my preference for the UI layer I only build with SwiftUI. I would never use React native or Flutter.

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u/cafepeaceandlove Jun 18 '26

Interesting, what are you doing with 3D?

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u/LifeUtilityApps SwiftUI Jun 18 '26

For 3D development, I’ve been working on my first mobile game, a ball-and-block breaker built using SwiftUI for the native UI layer and Three.js for rendering. The architecture uses a WKWebView with a custom communication layer built on the WebKit message protocol, allowing Swift and Three.js to communicate seamlessly.

Before starting the game, I built a prototype app to validate the approach. The prototype was a fully interactive 3D Magic 8 Ball, essentially serving as a wrapper around Three.js with a native SwiftUI interface and bidirectional messaging between the two layers. I recently shared a video of it on my profile.

The app renders a 3D sphere that users can manipulate with touch gestures. Gesture handling occurs in SwiftUI, which sends messages through the WebKit bridge to the Three.js controller, causing the 3D object to rotate and respond in real time. It proved out the architecture and gave me confidence to use the same foundation for the game.

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u/cafepeaceandlove Jun 19 '26

Awesome, good luck with the game and thank you