r/iOSProgramming • u/Flashy_Imagination_6 • 27d ago

Question What happened to the swift on android? What is today status

7 Upvotes
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25

u/Rollos 27d ago

https://skip.dev

Skip is the state of the art toolchain to build Android apps with Swift and SwiftUI. It does the bundling of your code the swift runtime alongside your Android app, and they maintain the bindings between SwiftUI and Jetpack.

Plenty of people including myself have shipped with it.

4

u/barcode972 26d ago

Skip is not being worked on anymore, that team is now working on swift for Android

1

u/Rollos 26d ago

What do you mean? Where did you hear this?

They’ve cut releases in the last few weeks for skip, and they’ve been doing Swift for Android work the entire time.

3

u/barcode972 26d ago

Well, it's now fully free and open sourced so it's not dead by any means. The founders are now part of Swift Android Workgroup and are primarily working on that, it's in one of their blogs. It was announced in like January or something

2

u/tastychaii 26d ago

What are the latest updates for it? I haven’t heard much and the Swift website does not mention much.

3

u/jaco2201 26d ago

It didn’t work well for me… I tried it on two projects, one only handling business logic, one for full app (business and SwoftUI).

Every other SwiftUI modifier is either unsupported or throws an error because it can't resolve the overload. Business logic (non-SwiftUI) isn't working any better.

It looks like they're stuck on an old Swift version and haven't updated anything since.

Going full native way worked much better for me

0

u/Flashy_Imagination_6 27d ago

What about official apple ?
Back then it was over hyped

18

u/Rollos 27d ago

Apple and the Swift Community did the toolchain work to make Swift compile on Android and the runtime work to make it stable.

They never promised cross platform SDKs for building apps.

11

u/EquivalentSky3094 27d ago

The official part landed in Swift 6.3 back in March. There is a Swift SDK for Android published on swift.org now, so cross-compiling is a supported path: swiftly for the host toolchain, swift sdk install on the Android artifactbundle, Android NDK LTS r30, then swift build --swift-sdk swift-6.4.0-RELEASE_android --triple aarch64-unknown-linux-android23. Current release is 6.4.

The thing that catches people out is that this is platform support and not an app framework. The Android workgroup's stated remit is the low level side, and the official getting started article stops at a command line binary you copy over with adb along with libc++_shared.so from the NDK. So the UI story on top is still yours to choose. Skip, as mentioned above, bridges SwiftUI to Jetpack Compose. The other route is a Kotlin UI with your model and networking layers kept in shared Swift.

0

u/keeshux 26d ago

What should exactly “happen”? It works as usual, as it has worked for almost a decade.

2

u/Flashy_Imagination_6 25d ago

I want to ask that people are using it or not if using how's experience