Apple’s Use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 16
The number of binaries composing iOS continues to increase: iOS 16 contains 5403 binaries, up from 4738 in iOS 15. That’s 665 new binaries.
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Without surprise, we can clearly confirm that some of the new iOS 16 features have been built using SwiftUI[…]
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When performing this analysis, one number surprised me: iOS 16 only contains 4 apps using the SwiftUI-based app lifecycle[…]
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Yet the Swift and SwiftUI adoption continues its exponential climb: iOS 16 contains 226 binaries using SwiftUI, which doubled the number from iOS 15. Likewise the number of binaries containing at least one line of Swift code increased consequently between iOS 15 and iOS 16[…]
That said, Objective-C still dominates the iOS codebase, with it being a part of over 65% of all binaries, which should answer the question of how close Apple is to deprecating it.
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It’s important to remember that going “all in” on SwiftUI isn’t necessary. Despite the famous message from this year’s keynote, the fastest and best way to write an iOS app today is with a mixture of technologies, and it appears that’s exactly what Apple is doing internally.
It’s all about how you interpret data. You could read this as, “Wow, SwiftUI is doubling in number of binaries!” Or, you could read this as, “Wow, SwiftUI is growing the same as UIKit in absolute terms and will therefore never catch it.”
Previously:
- Freeform Beta
- Apple’s Use of AppKit, Catalyst, and SwiftUI in macOS
- Thoughts on SwiftUI After WWDC 2022
- Apple’s Use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 15
