> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge.
This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero.
People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.
Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" while dealing with a bunch of users who will have the nagging thought of "Why the heck does this bug exist/this feature not exist? I could fix this in an afternoon." Ironically, open source relieves this pressure for multiple orders of magnitude more people than actually contribute, because they're only grappling with their own laziness, rather than resenting you, the developer.
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to
This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still among the most popular. While VSCode is wildly successful, and has completely unprecedented adoption rates, it was not borne out of people "building tools because they want to, then sharing it because it's free", but is rather the result of Microsoft's calculated gamble that open-source would give them more ecosystem capture and useful data through telemetry in the long run.
> Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"
This shouldn't really be true if software developers would think rationally about tools for three seconds. I believe the US median compensation for developers is approaching $200k? Any tool that saves a single hour of productivity is likely paying for itself, maybe two or three for the more expensive ones. Something that saves 40 hours of productivity is basically worth its weight in gold. You might be able to say "I can build this myself", but can you build it yourself in 1 hour? 40 hours? For most software, it would still take even longer than that. If you are a paid professional, and value your own time anywhere near what your employer does (I personally value my time more than any employer ever did), you should be extremely grateful for any opportunity to spend trivial sums of money in a way that allows you to reclaim hours to use in other ways.
I've been programming since ~1999 and anecdataly don't remember programmers having a culture of paying for their dev tools. On linux everything's free, and on windows I've used a plethora of freeware IDEs/compilers/etc. from turbo pascal, dev c++ (that's the name of it), later on eclipse took the stage in it's buggy mess and right before vscode there was atom. The only people that I know that used visual studio either got it for free for being a student/teacher, had their job pay for it, or most commonly: pirated it.
According to this[1] site visual studio had a 35.6% marketshare, tied at #1 with notepad++.
Yes, I'm aware. That's the problem elucidated in the article. Developers expect everything for free, even though the price of tools relative to what they get paid to deliver products using those tools is completely trivial. This reluctance to pay for anything harms developers themselves most of all. If developers normalized a culture of paying for things they use, more developers would be able to develop their own independent software and sustain themselves without being beholden to $awful_corp_environment to pay the bills. But because developers will do anything they can to avoid paying <1 hr salary for a tool that saves them many hours, there is a huge gap between corporate professionals, who make lots of money, and open-source developers, most of whom make almost nothing, with only a relatively limited subset of independent developers able to bridge the gap and make a living producing good, non-corporate-nightmare software.
I'm pretty pro-piracy for students and such. It is an extremely good thing for learning to be as available as possible, even to those in poverty, so that they can make something better of their situation and contribute more to society than if they were locked in to low-knowledge careers solely by virtue of the random chance of their upbringing. But people who make a living off software development never graduate from the mindset of piracy. Even for open-source software, the vast majority of users never contribute to funding those projects they rely on. If we think open-source software is good for the world, why are we so opposed to anyone being able to make a living creating it? The world's corporate capture by non-free software is a direct result of our own collective actions in refusing to pay anything for anything even when we can afford to.
Back in ye olden days, prior to teh interwebs, compilers were not free and it was an assumed price of entry to programming. Pirating has always been a thing, but I've paid for more than one compiler in my life and I wasn't exactly flush with cash.
I believe that there is a difference between developers as persons and developers as employees.
As a person, I don't think that I am very likely to pay for the tool I use to develop in my free time.
As an employee, I need to convince my company to pay for the tool. If it is a subscription, that's even worse. So well-known ones like Microsoft tools might already be approved, but for not-so-famous ones, it's harder.
If I want to depend on a third-party library/tool, I need to convince my company that the licence is fine, that the security is fine, and if it's not free I need to convince them to pay for it.
No. The fact that you built something yourself doesn't make it free to produce.
More over, you __won't__. You simply cannot build all of the things that you could buy at scale. What if you had to write all of your own video games? Or operating systems?
The thing is that one software is easy to crack and copy, so it is cheap...but a lot of softwares to work together is not, so that's why we have SaaS and PaaS today.
> some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools
Aren't we in the middle of literally the entire industry adopting 200/mo AI subscriptions? It seems to me like engineers will absolutely pay for tools if they justify their value.
The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom.
From the link:
> Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.
If it's GPL, it's not really source-available anymore. The dual licensing thing is more to give big companies a cheaper way out than bothering their lawyers.
Me personally, I treat source-available roughly the same as proprietary. I fix bugs in other people's code as suits my needs, and source-available is just hostile to the whole idea of anyone else touching the source.
> Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license?
I'm not GP but I would at least consider it. I say that as someone who refuses to build on closed-source tooling or libraries. I'd even consider closed-source if there was an irrevocable guarantee that the source would be released in its entirety (with a favorable open source license) if the license/pricing terms ever changed or the company ceased to exist or stopped supporting that product.
> Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?
I like that for personal tools but I wouldn't build my products or business on top of those. I've had too much trouble getting old binaries to work on new OS versions to consider these binaries to be usable in the long term.
Personally, probably not, although I would be more likely to than if I couldn't access the source.
I just don't have a good history with software created and sold by a company. Their incentives rarely seem aligned with mine, and I have had too many rug-pulls to fall for it again.
Companies that start out with sensible and open policies too often struggle to make money, and then end up trying to pull back on their openness and suddenly important bits aren't able to be modified or controlled by the user anymore.
To be completely fair, this becomes significantly less mystifying when you trace back the origins of the free software movement...
edit: To be a bit less opaque, a relevant quote:
> In the late 1970s, Richard Stallman had an issue with a new printer installed in the MIT AI Lab, where he worked at the time, which ran proprietary firmware. Richard Stallman was frustrated that he could not receive a copy of the printer software and edit the code to solve his problem. This early experience made him realize limits of non-free software was a social issue.
Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software. It's just that the particular rights that GNU was concerned with also makes it challenging to have a moat on monetizing the resulting software.
> Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software.
The cost (free) got me looking, but the rights, now that's what kept me.
Costs - being a poor student meant I was not ever in a position to pay for products (even those massively subsidised by companies like Microsoft) - there was no way I could buy an IDE, or a compiler, or anything that I needed to /learn/.
Rights - once I had the products, I was able to see how they worked, and, more importantly, make changes that worked for me, and, if desired, share those changes so other people could take advantage of them. None of that was possible under the other licences.
This is a wrong framing. I don't want to depend on anything fundamental that would be limited by my ability to pay. The problem is not the money, but the enforcement, the licensing. It usually implies closed source, problems provisioning (a separate license for CI/CD?), and ultimately stuff like hardware crypto keys and online checks.
This is acceptable for highly specialized software with hundreds or even dozens of installations (like some mega-CAD systems). It should rather not be the case for smaller-time, widespread tools. It just doesn't work well, like the maker of Skip noticed. It stunts the development of the tool, making it impossible to meaningfully contribute.
With that, I'm all for paying open-source developers: via donations, sponsorships, hiring them for contract work, or full-time. I'd like this to be a socially accepted norm, expected behavior for corporations, but not a legally enforced requirement.
I've paid for tools in the past, but I think there's a difference, the value of a lot of our tools isn't that great, but more importantly, there is a huge cost to adoption. Going in blind on a paid tool, putting in the time to learn and train yourself to use it, that's a high cost for something that you need to pay for entry and recurring after, that maybe 50 hours into it you start to realize you don't like it.
When I've paid for tools, it tends to be a tool that was free for me to start using, that is now part of my workflow and I love, and I am worried it won't continue to be maintained or updated so I pay for it.
But, as the article points out, developers do pay for the tools indirectly - "First-party IDEs like Xcode and Android Studio, popular integration frameworks, and essential dev tools are all given away at no (direct) cost. The platform vendors monetize through developer program fees, app store commissions, and cloud services. Framework providers typically monetize through complementary services."
And note that the article points out two other hurdles / drawbacks to adoption - their product required a subscription and developers are unwilling to commit to product from a small company that they fear may go under.
That's because open source tools are way better for software developers.
I find quirks or bugs or limitations in my tools all the time, and when they are open source I can fix and augment the tools however I want, and I can share those changes with others.
I can't do that for closed source software.
Now, for most software users it doesn't really matter because they couldn't fix a bug or add a feature anyway. Closed and open source are functionally equivalent, and it makes more sense to pay for support and not care you can't change it yourself.
I think this is kind of like cars; people who work on cars want to buy a car that doesn't have a bunch of electronic and proprietary parts that can't be worked on in their garage. On the other hand, people who won't work on their car anyway don't care.
> This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
This is just plain false. The total software and SaaS tool spend at every company I’ve worked for in the past decade has been incredibly high.
Developers also commonly bring their own paid tools when it’s allowed: JetBrains is common. Many people have paid Git GUIs or merge tools.
I think the hard truth is that getting adoption on a new paid tool is really hard, especially when you’re not sure if it’s even going to be around in a couple years.
When there are open source alternatives it’s usually not about cost. We’d happily pay for something that was higher quality and helped us develop faster if it didn’t come with its own set of risks. The difference is that OSS is something we can pick up and carry along with the community even if the maintainers go a different direction. We don’t have to worry about sudden license price increases or unfavorable terms appearing at renewal time, which happens constantly now.
Engineers are happy to pay for tools (hello, Claude Code). Libraries are quite different and it's a little uncomfortable to build a business on a closed-source, proprietary library.
I’ve paid for a few things for work, but I’m always living a bit outside of corporate rules when I do that. This makes it hard for me to justify if it’s only for work. In other cases, the licensing of the product doesn’t allow me to bring my personal license to work.
I’ve paid for 2 text editors, that I used personally, but also took it to work. Now I use VS Code, because the company essentially mandated it with the way they rolled out GitHub Copilot and wanted to see metrics on it. This pushed me to VSCodium at home, so I don’t have to live 2 different worlds.
I paid for the font I use in my editor, I assume that’s not something that will get flagged.
Transmit (from Panic) and Kagi are the other two things I’m using at work with my personal account. I keep waiting for them to randomly stop working one day.
Getting an actual license for software through work, that isn’t already approved, requires so much bureaucracy and red tape; I don’t even know where to begin.
I sometimes daydream about working for myself or a small company, where I can use whatever I want.
Paying for things that aren't worth it is noble, but not good economics in the long run. If people want to buy a tool not for what it produces but for the story it tells, this is fine. But just like startups need product-market fit, tools also need product-market fit, and if no one is buying, it could simply be that the alternatives are suitable replacements.
I agree. When people bemoan the death of lisp machines and RAD and whatnot, remember that we deserve it. We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this.
> damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools
I'm gonna pay for work. I'm not gonna pay for copy of some bytes. Especially not because lawyers say so.
Figure out a business model that doesn't require you to put a policeman behind my back to make it work. It's not that hard. Steam has one. GOG has one.
> This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.
Provably false. My bank app (Nubank) is written in Flutter and it's one of the most used banks in Brazil (100mi+ clients who rely on the iPhone or Android app, since it's a digital bank with no web interface).
Genuinely curious: What does the number of installs have to do with anything? I didn't see anything about that in the linked post (which is brief, and only about React Native), and can't figure out how popularity of an app connects to which framework is used.
Would be interested to learn how this general rule of thumb works.
> This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.
Well, I did work on a Flutter app with a tiny team between 2018-2021 and we had 15M installs, were app of the day, got featured multiple times in the App Store, got Google’s design award, were a preloaded app on iPhones in Apple Stores in several countries, and were overall doing quite well.
It was a very focused app though, so the size of our codebase didn’t really grow with the number of installs.
New iOS and Android features, sometimes backward-incompatible are introduced.
And now, you need your dependencies to implement them. Which might or might not happen. At best, this makes usage inferior. At worst, you can no longer publish an update in app stores.
This app was started in 2017 and it is still running today and making (way more modest than back then) revenue. It’s just that I don’t work on it anymore.
This is a welcome addition but why should Flutter devs use this ?
Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications.
I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.
See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well.
> near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible)
Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are already starting to feel outdated.
Flutter's grim outlook has resulted in a surge of interest in Skip, and it was one of the drivers for us to open up the platform and catch the wave. If you love Dart, or if your apps don't need to look native (e.g., games or very bespoke interfaces), then Flutter might continue to be acceptable. But everyone else is starting to look elsewhere, especially in cases where their business depends on their apps feeling premium and native.
> Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions
To be fair reading those updates it sounds a lot more positive than this comment makes it seem. I.e. "they're pausing design updates while they figure out the best way to do it" rather than "they're not going to bother":
> This strategic pause on design updates gives us the space to ensure the long-term health and maintainability of Flutter's design libraries. We are committed to being transparent with our contributor community as we explore these options and will have more to share on our findings and future direction in the coming weeks.
and
> The material and cupertino libraries are being decoupled into standalone packages to accelerate feature development. All new work for iOS26 updates in Cupertino will happen in the new packages once established in flutter/packages.
Well sorry. But Android UI is bad just bad. The settings, the menus. Its bloated and almost as if they deliberately made it annoying to use. It just sucks.
Dunno about Skip, but I can always tell when an app is Flutter. They feel like crap. Everything's a bit off with the native looking widgets. And fully custom designs still animate a bit weirdly. And they definitely still stutter. Somehow a tier below React Native.
Flutter re-generates the entire layout every tick and diffs it (immediate-mode), like a game engine. If your device isn't quite fast enough it'll lag, yep. RN is retained mode (but written in immediate-mode style and the diffing only happens when it has to).
Interesting, I didn’t know that it was immediate mode. According to the article [1] though, it now uses rendering engine with Retained Mode due to performance issues.
I'd say it's the opposite, on crappy devices, Flutter feels faster than native, not sure how but that's the end result. I've been testing on an old Samsung J3 and it's definitely better than native.
Flutter is fine if you don't care about performance, accessibility, have no need to access native capabilities or non-fluttered widgets (ex: the Google map integration is awful) and overall just want to make an internal app.
The cost of making an excellent flutter app is about the same you'd pay making fully native apps. Except that you're always paying for Skia's costs with Flutter.
This recommends 32GB to run _everything_, so xcode, gradle, emulators, simulators, etc. Not fully surprising.
Flutter doesn't use Skia anymore and you can absolutely bind to native libraries from Flutter with ease [0]. The current strategy (build hooks) is relatively new. You can also just write Kotlin or Swift for your application [1] using channel APIs. Finally, you can still have native pages in your app if needed for certain widgets [2] and still save time rewriting everything and all of your business logic for every single other page of the application that doesn't need those widgets. In fact, you can even mix native widgets and Flutter-rendered widgets in the same screen.
And are comfortable making a 1-2 million dollar per devteam per year bet that Google won't rug pull you. And they seem to have no important or big app on it.
On an unrelated note, in 2024 Google did layoffs on the Flutter team.
Flutter still doesn't support liquid glass on iOS so it doesn't seem like a serious contender to me at this point. And due to the nature of how Flutter is implemented, it's going to continuously be an uphill battle. Maybe it's fine if you intend on having a completely custom UI and don't care about platform look and feel.
In general, the "render UI as if it were a video game" route feels like a bit of a dead end on mobile to me. On desktop it's more workable but still isn't without issues.
This is cool, but there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory.
This has a license: https://github.com/skiptools/skipstone but it vendors the other repo according to the readme? I am super confused about how this would work.
Huh, what does one have to do to comply with the LGPL on iOS anyways?
I'm sort of surprised that only the largest plan ($5000/month) and not the ($10/$500/$2,500/month plans) includes a license that doesn't involve figuring that nonsense out.
As I understand the LGPL - not a lawyer - you have to somehow enable all your users to relink your application against a different version of Skip (4.d.0 since 4.d.1 isn't possible on iOS). This means that your application must do something like include a copy of all the files that went into linking the application and convey that to the users along with your application, with scripts to build the application against a different version of Skip...
I can't imagine the app store would be particularly amused with this during app review... though I've never tried.
This is great news, thank you. I have been looking into a way to port Soundscape Community [1], a navigation app for the blind to Android without having two codebases to maintain. Skip looks ideal; I was planning on asking you about licensing for a very small team with almost no funding.
Someone else already asked about talkback accessibility; I assume it will work because it translates to native UI controls on android. Is that correct?
Yes, as I just responded there, Skip uses the native toolkits and conventions on both platforms: SwiftUI on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android. So you automatically get the platforms' built-in accessibility support.
Well, you're running both the iOS development tools (Xcode, iOS Simulator), plus the Android development tools (Gradle, Android emulator, and maybe Android Studio too). These add up.
16GB might be possible, though.
(Skip itself doesn't take much memory. If you run it headlessly as a SwiftPM plugin, you wouldn't need nearly that much.)
Do you have to run both at the same time? Because my flow with React Native is to focus on one platform at a time, I don't try to run everything in one shot.
No, you can configure it to just build and launch for iOS or Android separately. But we do recommend iterating on both in parallel for most of the UI work, just to make sure that everything stays in sync.
For framework/library development, you can of course build and test separately for each platform.
Likely because it uses both iOS and Android toolchains plus its own transpiler (with Skip Lite) or other overhead with Skip Fuse. iOS alone is already challenging with 16GB. Don't blame Skip for this - it's on Apple and Google for not shipping memory-efficient tooling, which shouldn't be a surprise if you've used their software.
Thank you for making it open-source (and free!) I looked into Skip before because I’d rather write native Swift than the in-between tangle of code that React Native tends to become. What prevented me from using it was the lack of case studies or apps in production. Has that changed? I looked on the homepage and couldn’t see any. Of course, I understand it might be a growing community and targeted to early adopters for now.
As we mentioned in the post, developer tools really need to be freely obtainable in order to gain mass adoption. In that sense, it was an easy strategic decision. And we felt that the time was right, given that Skip's benefits are being thrust to the foreground in light of recent developments.
You should really consider why free software exists. Open source is open source, sure, but it is a disservice to your users to ever release proprietary software for any reason.
I personally would not start or run a business that didn’t release all software it builds under free software licenses. We don’t open source it because “developers expect it”, we open source it because it’s the right thing to do by your users.
> Free software is an ideology, not just a license.
Yes and people shouldn't enforce ideology on top of each other. I am speaking this as an free software advocate too.
the fact of the matter is open source is still barely fundable and I am pretty sure that they evaluated multiple decisions to come up to this regarding how fundable it is and other factors.
If we have to indoctrinate someone into our ideology, it means that our ideology is unable to gain weight by its own merit. No, let open source do the work and welcome people for who are now open source. Have open arms to everyone who open sources their work & incentive them to do so with a happy heart.
Open source is about freedom. And being honest, If they wrote the code themselves, then its their freedom to have it in open source or not.
I for one, welcome another great open source! Thanks for going open source and Good luck to skip in future!
I know Open source has some issues regarding funding etc. so I hope that people donate to skip & make the project sustainable!
Yeah but if that was the only reason to do open source that was encouraged then there’d almost certainly be a lot less open source software overall (and lower quality). Personally I’d prefer OSS win overall even if it costs some ideological purity.
I don’t open source my iOS apps that provide my living because there are many examples already of others using this to release identical apps without credit or sharing their work back (even with AGPL), which would remove my source of income that enables me to work on it in the first place. I haven’t found a way to make a living off open source yet for the type of products I produce.
I’m not independently wealthy to be able to afford to work for free. If I release my work for free, then I will have to live on the streets or in a cell, or take a job and lose the time I have to produce my work in the first place.
This is indeed a dilemma, but note that copyleft licenses like GPL or MPL do give you considerably more protection than a pushover license like MIT/BSD. I wrote about this last year at https://appfair.org/blog/gpl-and-the-app-stores.
It gives near zero practical protection as the devs that clone in the App Store do not respect licenses and Apple is slow to act (sometimes shutting your own dev account instead of the copycat’s, another high risk).
Enabling copycats also encourages them to target my apps for fake negative review spam and bot activity that gets my dev account (and personal iCloud) flagged and banned without recourse.
I also have no funds to sue someone. And the copycats are often anonymous and overseas in random countries, adding to the challenge of doing anything about it besides begging Apple to help without accidentally hurting me instead.
hey, came from the other comment you messaged me but this feels like such an apple issue which is so fixable that I am not understanding why Apple won't do it.
I understand what you are feeling but I feel like what you are saying is genuine and although sad right now, it provides a course of action for Apple to work upon to meaningfully improve it so that we can get atleast either custom license source available (as I mentioned in my other comment) or GPL/restrictive Copyleft as this mentions.
If someone from Apple's reading this. This feels such a large issue even more than the license issues in general, is Apple working on this or not?
This would honestly show the real loyalty towards developers if Apple can do this so I am waiting and perhaps a movement can be created to establish some formally written demands/ perhaps a change.org petition?
Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.
> Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.
Isn't there an EU law where if Enough signatures happen they are forced to discuss it in the EU parliament or similar? I remember this from the stop killing games movement iirc.
Mass organizations can take place too but why not a mix of both utilizing both regulations and mass organizations?
AGPL seems like a joke when it comes up against the indie hacker world. Has there ever been an example of an open-source maintainer successfully suing someone who ripped off their codebase without attribution? Doubtful.
Shame that the world has to be like this in the first place :<
Perhaps I am way too altruist at times & the world is capitalist without any discrimination, stealing anyone's work and reselling it feels so scummy and I have heard it happen actually so you are not actually completely in the wrong and its your code and your lifestyle and so I respect it. (Even if I am an open source advocate, I will admit making money from Open source is super hard in many cases)
Interestingly, what's your thoughts on Source available licenses. Like, honestly, like use a license which doesn't allow reusing components or providing another appstore release of that or similar
If you use github actions with immutable and other instances, I feel like there is a real way of like verifying that the code written is safe & people can verify it & trust it.
If people want to modify your product, they have to pay you and get in touch with you.
I will take this with additional security context and being able to audit over having nothing in the first place! (Hopefully I hope this might not impact your living either in any way and honestly even if you do this! Some of us would deeply appreciate it)
Something is better than nothing. If even much of the world goes to source available licenses, I feel like the transition to open source of softwares becomes much simpler as well if enough conditions (like people start donating/govts start investing in open source) etc. happen!
Source availability still provides one to that direction & is still overall positive with atleast in this context, virtually zero downsides.
Yes, the unique benefit of Skip is that you are using the real native toolkits on both platforms. So you get both SwiftUI's accessibility support via VoiceOver, as well as Jetpack Compose's support via TalkBack.
Note: TalkBack is the best case scenario you're getting on Android. I've seen some abominations coming out of Samsung's implementation, and results will vary from device to device.
Still, assume people are using TalkBack and don't take reports from anything else, it'll prevent you from going insane.
That's awesome! My family has users of both, so this might be a convenient way to use a pleasant language to write mobile apps that all of my family members can play with.
Interesting. I used Expo recently and loved the development experience. I also built a simple iPhone app with Swift, and it was a decent experience. I have plans of building another iPhone app and was considering Swift again, which would make me miss building an Android app, but maybe Skip would allow me to do it anyways.
Biggest downside to SwiftUI development is lack of hot reloading. You can use the Inject framework but it’s fragile. This also makes it harder to iterate on with agents.
Small views don't solve this for human use either. The only solutions for fast builds are to stop using SPM and also to adopt the "microfeatures" pattern with interface stubs and dependency injection so that very little must be rebuilt/linked. This is a huge change for many projects and carries ongoing development maintenance overhead so it is not a trivial decision to make.
Good question. I'll try to answer as objectively as possible, despite my bias towards Skip's approach.
Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) enables you to target different platforms with your Kotlin. In the context of mobile apps, it allows you to compile your Kotlin to a native framework for iOS, so you can reuse your business logic. On iOS, the Kotlin is running in its own little garbage-collected runtime, but it sets up a bridge to Objective-C and Swift, so the iOS developers can communicate with it from their apps (the interface of which will typically be written separately for each platform). It is neat technology, and Skip integrates with it[1]. We were on their Talking Kotlin podcast in 2024 talking about it[2].
When targeting just the shared business logic and not the UI, Skip is, in some ways, the inverse of KMP: whereas they let you share Kotlin logic between the iOS and Android app, Skip lets you share the Swift logic. Skip operates in two different modes[3]: Skip Lite and Skip Fuse. Skip Lite is the original version of Skip, and transpiles your Swift into Kotlin. Skip Fuse is a later iteration and resulted from the formation of the Swift Android workgroup[4], of which we are founding members. In both modes, you can share your Skip business logic layer between multiple apps, and this is a popular application of Skip (e.g., see this talk at NSSpain[5]).
So that's the story for shared logic. Now onto the user interface part:
While I mentioned that Skip _can_ be used just for sharing business logic, it really shines when you build your whole app with it. You write your app in conventional SwiftUI, and Skip will translate it into the equivalent Jetpack Compose (which is now Android's official recommended way to build apps). Launching your app from Xcode will bring up both your iOS app in the simulator, and the equivalent Android app in the emulator. It is designed to be a single vertically-integrated app creation solution, and enables a single team (or a single developer) to iterate on both platforms at the same time, without any of the coordination overhead of building two separate apps for the two platforms.
KMP itself doesn't have an equivalent, but it does have a sibling project "Compose Multiplatform" (CMP), which is built on top of KMP and sort of does the opposite: it lets you write your app in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose and run it on iOS. But the way that it achieves this is different from Skip's approach: it doesn't use native controls on iOS, but instead paints pixels on the screen that mimic the native iOS UI (à la Flutter). The results are predictable: an uncanny valley UI that doesn't feel _quite_ right, and that struggles to keep up with the platform conventions. Notably, like Flutter, they won't be able to support Liquid Glass in any convincing form, and so apps built with it are going to be stuck on outdated iOS UI conventions. In short: CMP is native on Android but alien on iOS, whereas Skip is native on both platforms.
That's our take on the difference between the two. In fairness to KMP, they do have some distinct advantages in terms of reach: whereas Skip is squarely focused on just mobile platforms, KMP can target desktops and the web as well. If that is a priority for you, or you already have a lot of Kotlin experience or are invested in the ecosystem, then KMP might be a good fit for your needs. But if you like Swift and SwiftUI, and are happy working with the Apple developer tools, then you should give Skip a try. It really is magic.
> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge.
I've run into this too with my own app. I thought people would like a Lua GUI framework that's professional grade and gives you full access to WinAPI via Lua. I was using DragonRuby as my model.
So I wasted a thousand hours making the app and its documentation. Turns out, even after people understood what it was (I suck at marketing), everyone still agreed that whatever it could become or ever evolve into was still not worth a dime.
Now I'm faced with a decision. Do I open source it? I think, no. What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.
Then, should I open source it altruistically? What for? First of all, giving things away for free is not inherently good. One negative side effect is teaching people not to rely on their own industry. Another is that they may use it for evil. And then, it feels like such a waste to let the code die out.
The point of open-sourcing is to put it on peoples’ map at all.
Development tools have to be fully dependable (maintained, no rug pull) and proprietary software just carries too much risk in that regard for a lot of people.
> What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.
I encourage you to find a way out of this belief, or at least least fend it off as long as possible.
You can see from recent HN postings that most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.
>most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.
You don't have to. Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because less devs are needed for the same level of output) is just as bad.
Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because the AI industry imploded and the devs from that industry are now in the market) is just as bad.
The rise of companies you might end up where some/most the codebase or db schemas were vibe generated is just as bad. LLMs are the new VB6. At least, with VB6 the initial complexity of the apps would be limited by how much the cowboy coder could handle (ie. not infinite). With LLMs that limit is an order of magnitude higher. I expect many of the future legacy apps to be dangerous jungles of vibes many contractors will be urgently hired to immediately fix when things begin behaving weirdly and the causes of the issue are hidden somewhere in the jungle.
Any of the above is bad enough on its own, let alone combined. I strongly believe two of the above will happen within the next 5 years.
Hey! (firstly recognized you from your other post on HN)
Personally I would love the idea of creating a lua application natively. You don't know how much I wanted it now that you mention it.
I remember looking for such solutions,finding none, then I even thought of using kotlin apps with lua integration but didn't like the idea of learning kotlin
For some reason, even though I have only played just a little bit with lua, there are tons of options which compile down to lua which can make it really powerful too and so for the end developer, there are tons of possibilities and it starts out being so simple!
I think the problem with lua was that there is a lack of libraries & projects regarding it so this might actually help it
I have another question tho and I'd love it if you can answer it.
Is there any way that I can write a cli application in golang or port it to something with just glue code being lua and using it for android somehow?
I don't want to create an android application in golang itself for what its worth because I find the primitive a little lacking (what do I use, wails?)
I have heard people use python kite or something iirc which looked good but python-go support isn't the best & i dont even know if its on android
If you can actually provide lua as the UI/UX support (I am imagining something simple but powerful) with code being allowed in other languages where I can get some powerful libraries (golang), I would be super interested in it.
Regarding Open source, I would personally trust the project a lot more if this was open source.
That being said, I understand the worry of changing careers/consultancy/AI marketing because I am still a teenager in high school. I have anxiety because I have an exam for the colleg ein 2 days, I am a bit cooked haha but I guess I just gotta try
Your fears are valid and somehow I imagine you in a position wayy similar to raylib & I remembered this post.
Honestly, what are your thoughts in teaching at a college about app development with lua, I mean I am a teenager and I would die for such a course!
Although I was never into roblox, some of my friends were and they treat lua as the holy grail because of roblox development and roblox's development community is from what I can gather decently respected especially if you are teen, some even learn lua just for it.
so you can get people who are interested in already having some gui experience with lua (more in a game environment but still) and you tell them that you can make apps with it just as easily? People will be hooked.
Of course there is some LLM but honestly, nobody cares. LLM's wont be able to recreate your project, I am mostly sure of it.
Marketing is something that I relate with too because we never know what the public really really wants.
I mean, I will admit it, We people are kind of hypocrites (speaking from my behalf)
Sometimes we would open source project and want it to be sustainable without paying the devs or donating to them, that sucks. Some of us just want open source for ideological reasons and um, honestly, I will admit it. It's your code, do what you want it, you built it and you should be proud of it!
We can only give suggestions but I recommend you to create some video of the project so that I can see it.
App developments are fucking nightmares. I had even thought of using godot just to create app development. Any new solution provided decent enough can absolutely help.
Personally I believe you should wait for some time & try to write a blog post about it. I want to hear all the nerdy details!
Create a show HN post, I saw tomhow mention to me how much of the audience wants originality and the idea of "aha moments"/something novel. Provide us with knowledge of what aha moments did you discover during building this, I am soo curious myself!
Good luck man and I genuinely hope the best of luck for you man! Just message me whenever you feel like it or mail me, Will try to respond to ya if you ever need my help (I don't think so but I'd love to playtest what you are mentioning too!)
Oh yea just a teeny bti suggestion adding on that golang one, can you just make it so that I can have a very simple and easy/fast way of compiling golang cli applications into gui android applications with lua code. I personally want this so bad because there are soo many good and lovely open source golang cli and I wanted to be part of f-droid by creating an application gui for some golang cli tool we might use but it felt sooooooo hard that I gave up. (Yes I even used tauri and ended up waking up till 5 am debugging)
The pain point's definitely real and LLM's won't be able to make this. Only the people like you who are truly passionate about such projects can make it. It's a unique project and you should be proud of it and I hope that the project has a good future!
I wish there are something for SwiftUI on Windows. I meant to support Windows for Draw Things, but the opportunity cost is too high without proper UI tooling.
The reasoning for making this choice was refreshingly sober and clear-minded. If there was anything that would help tooling reach critical mass, it's turning it into OSS.
I've built with Flutter and React Native a few times over the years, but I will give Skip a go in my next project, I've heard a lot actually.
> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge.
This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero.
People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.
Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" while dealing with a bunch of users who will have the nagging thought of "Why the heck does this bug exist/this feature not exist? I could fix this in an afternoon." Ironically, open source relieves this pressure for multiple orders of magnitude more people than actually contribute, because they're only grappling with their own laziness, rather than resenting you, the developer.
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to
This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still among the most popular. While VSCode is wildly successful, and has completely unprecedented adoption rates, it was not borne out of people "building tools because they want to, then sharing it because it's free", but is rather the result of Microsoft's calculated gamble that open-source would give them more ecosystem capture and useful data through telemetry in the long run.
> Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"
This shouldn't really be true if software developers would think rationally about tools for three seconds. I believe the US median compensation for developers is approaching $200k? Any tool that saves a single hour of productivity is likely paying for itself, maybe two or three for the more expensive ones. Something that saves 40 hours of productivity is basically worth its weight in gold. You might be able to say "I can build this myself", but can you build it yourself in 1 hour? 40 hours? For most software, it would still take even longer than that. If you are a paid professional, and value your own time anywhere near what your employer does (I personally value my time more than any employer ever did), you should be extremely grateful for any opportunity to spend trivial sums of money in a way that allows you to reclaim hours to use in other ways.
I've been programming since ~1999 and anecdataly don't remember programmers having a culture of paying for their dev tools. On linux everything's free, and on windows I've used a plethora of freeware IDEs/compilers/etc. from turbo pascal, dev c++ (that's the name of it), later on eclipse took the stage in it's buggy mess and right before vscode there was atom. The only people that I know that used visual studio either got it for free for being a student/teacher, had their job pay for it, or most commonly: pirated it.
According to this[1] site visual studio had a 35.6% marketshare, tied at #1 with notepad++.
[1] https://asterisk.dynevor.org/editor-dominance.html
> or most commonly: pirated it.
Yes, I'm aware. That's the problem elucidated in the article. Developers expect everything for free, even though the price of tools relative to what they get paid to deliver products using those tools is completely trivial. This reluctance to pay for anything harms developers themselves most of all. If developers normalized a culture of paying for things they use, more developers would be able to develop their own independent software and sustain themselves without being beholden to $awful_corp_environment to pay the bills. But because developers will do anything they can to avoid paying <1 hr salary for a tool that saves them many hours, there is a huge gap between corporate professionals, who make lots of money, and open-source developers, most of whom make almost nothing, with only a relatively limited subset of independent developers able to bridge the gap and make a living producing good, non-corporate-nightmare software.
I'm pretty pro-piracy for students and such. It is an extremely good thing for learning to be as available as possible, even to those in poverty, so that they can make something better of their situation and contribute more to society than if they were locked in to low-knowledge careers solely by virtue of the random chance of their upbringing. But people who make a living off software development never graduate from the mindset of piracy. Even for open-source software, the vast majority of users never contribute to funding those projects they rely on. If we think open-source software is good for the world, why are we so opposed to anyone being able to make a living creating it? The world's corporate capture by non-free software is a direct result of our own collective actions in refusing to pay anything for anything even when we can afford to.
While many hobbyists developer market, like the hobbyist graphic design market, pirated their tools, the corporate market did paid for their tools.
The issue here is that they the developers aren't convincing their companies to pay for libraries now, partly because a lot of the tools are now free.
Turbo Pascal was not freeware when it was new.
Back in ye olden days, prior to teh interwebs, compilers were not free and it was an assumed price of entry to programming. Pirating has always been a thing, but I've paid for more than one compiler in my life and I wasn't exactly flush with cash.
I believe that there is a difference between developers as persons and developers as employees.
As a person, I don't think that I am very likely to pay for the tool I use to develop in my free time.
As an employee, I need to convince my company to pay for the tool. If it is a subscription, that's even worse. So well-known ones like Microsoft tools might already be approved, but for not-so-famous ones, it's harder.
If I want to depend on a third-party library/tool, I need to convince my company that the licence is fine, that the security is fine, and if it's not free I need to convince them to pay for it.
> Manufacturing costs are zero
No. The fact that you built something yourself doesn't make it free to produce.
More over, you __won't__. You simply cannot build all of the things that you could buy at scale. What if you had to write all of your own video games? Or operating systems?
> you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"
Even more so these days with agentic coding
> distribution and manufacturing costs are zero.
???? citation needed
Once the software is written, it is ~free to copy. People pay a lot of money to avoid the software getting copied... and it gets copied anyways.
The thing is that one software is easy to crack and copy, so it is cheap...but a lot of softwares to work together is not, so that's why we have SaaS and PaaS today.
> some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools
Aren't we in the middle of literally the entire industry adopting 200/mo AI subscriptions? It seems to me like engineers will absolutely pay for tools if they justify their value.
Every company I know is lamenting their out of control SaaS spend for developer tooling.
$200/month/user isn’t a big incremental cost, to be honest. SaaS and subscription tooling costs are high for developers.
The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom.
From the link:
> Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.
Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license?
Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?
If it's GPL, it's not really source-available anymore. The dual licensing thing is more to give big companies a cheaper way out than bothering their lawyers.
Me personally, I treat source-available roughly the same as proprietary. I fix bugs in other people's code as suits my needs, and source-available is just hostile to the whole idea of anyone else touching the source.
> Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license?
I'm not GP but I would at least consider it. I say that as someone who refuses to build on closed-source tooling or libraries. I'd even consider closed-source if there was an irrevocable guarantee that the source would be released in its entirety (with a favorable open source license) if the license/pricing terms ever changed or the company ceased to exist or stopped supporting that product.
> Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?
I like that for personal tools but I wouldn't build my products or business on top of those. I've had too much trouble getting old binaries to work on new OS versions to consider these binaries to be usable in the long term.
Personally, probably not, although I would be more likely to than if I couldn't access the source.
I just don't have a good history with software created and sold by a company. Their incentives rarely seem aligned with mine, and I have had too many rug-pulls to fall for it again.
Companies that start out with sensible and open policies too often struggle to make money, and then end up trying to pull back on their openness and suddenly important bits aren't able to be modified or controlled by the user anymore.
To be completely fair, this becomes significantly less mystifying when you trace back the origins of the free software movement...
edit: To be a bit less opaque, a relevant quote:
> In the late 1970s, Richard Stallman had an issue with a new printer installed in the MIT AI Lab, where he worked at the time, which ran proprietary firmware. Richard Stallman was frustrated that he could not receive a copy of the printer software and edit the code to solve his problem. This early experience made him realize limits of non-free software was a social issue.
Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software. It's just that the particular rights that GNU was concerned with also makes it challenging to have a moat on monetizing the resulting software.
> Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software.
The cost (free) got me looking, but the rights, now that's what kept me.
Costs - being a poor student meant I was not ever in a position to pay for products (even those massively subsidised by companies like Microsoft) - there was no way I could buy an IDE, or a compiler, or anything that I needed to /learn/.
Rights - once I had the products, I was able to see how they worked, and, more importantly, make changes that worked for me, and, if desired, share those changes so other people could take advantage of them. None of that was possible under the other licences.
This is a wrong framing. I don't want to depend on anything fundamental that would be limited by my ability to pay. The problem is not the money, but the enforcement, the licensing. It usually implies closed source, problems provisioning (a separate license for CI/CD?), and ultimately stuff like hardware crypto keys and online checks.
This is acceptable for highly specialized software with hundreds or even dozens of installations (like some mega-CAD systems). It should rather not be the case for smaller-time, widespread tools. It just doesn't work well, like the maker of Skip noticed. It stunts the development of the tool, making it impossible to meaningfully contribute.
With that, I'm all for paying open-source developers: via donations, sponsorships, hiring them for contract work, or full-time. I'd like this to be a socially accepted norm, expected behavior for corporations, but not a legally enforced requirement.
I've paid for tools in the past, but I think there's a difference, the value of a lot of our tools isn't that great, but more importantly, there is a huge cost to adoption. Going in blind on a paid tool, putting in the time to learn and train yourself to use it, that's a high cost for something that you need to pay for entry and recurring after, that maybe 50 hours into it you start to realize you don't like it.
When I've paid for tools, it tends to be a tool that was free for me to start using, that is now part of my workflow and I love, and I am worried it won't continue to be maintained or updated so I pay for it.
But, as the article points out, developers do pay for the tools indirectly - "First-party IDEs like Xcode and Android Studio, popular integration frameworks, and essential dev tools are all given away at no (direct) cost. The platform vendors monetize through developer program fees, app store commissions, and cloud services. Framework providers typically monetize through complementary services."
And note that the article points out two other hurdles / drawbacks to adoption - their product required a subscription and developers are unwilling to commit to product from a small company that they fear may go under.
This is only true for a subset of software like mobile apps. Web developers are not paying for anything except compute.
That's because open source tools are way better for software developers.
I find quirks or bugs or limitations in my tools all the time, and when they are open source I can fix and augment the tools however I want, and I can share those changes with others.
I can't do that for closed source software.
Now, for most software users it doesn't really matter because they couldn't fix a bug or add a feature anyway. Closed and open source are functionally equivalent, and it makes more sense to pay for support and not care you can't change it yourself.
I think this is kind of like cars; people who work on cars want to buy a car that doesn't have a bunch of electronic and proprietary parts that can't be worked on in their garage. On the other hand, people who won't work on their car anyway don't care.
> This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
This is just plain false. The total software and SaaS tool spend at every company I’ve worked for in the past decade has been incredibly high.
Developers also commonly bring their own paid tools when it’s allowed: JetBrains is common. Many people have paid Git GUIs or merge tools.
I think the hard truth is that getting adoption on a new paid tool is really hard, especially when you’re not sure if it’s even going to be around in a couple years.
When there are open source alternatives it’s usually not about cost. We’d happily pay for something that was higher quality and helped us develop faster if it didn’t come with its own set of risks. The difference is that OSS is something we can pick up and carry along with the community even if the maintainers go a different direction. We don’t have to worry about sudden license price increases or unfavorable terms appearing at renewal time, which happens constantly now.
Engineers are happy to pay for tools (hello, Claude Code). Libraries are quite different and it's a little uncomfortable to build a business on a closed-source, proprietary library.
No one pays for Claude Code, they pay a subscription to access the Claude Models.
lmao who even unironcally uses claude code when other harnesses exist that eclipse them ?
I’ve paid for a few things for work, but I’m always living a bit outside of corporate rules when I do that. This makes it hard for me to justify if it’s only for work. In other cases, the licensing of the product doesn’t allow me to bring my personal license to work.
I’ve paid for 2 text editors, that I used personally, but also took it to work. Now I use VS Code, because the company essentially mandated it with the way they rolled out GitHub Copilot and wanted to see metrics on it. This pushed me to VSCodium at home, so I don’t have to live 2 different worlds.
I paid for the font I use in my editor, I assume that’s not something that will get flagged.
Transmit (from Panic) and Kagi are the other two things I’m using at work with my personal account. I keep waiting for them to randomly stop working one day.
Getting an actual license for software through work, that isn’t already approved, requires so much bureaucracy and red tape; I don’t even know where to begin.
I sometimes daydream about working for myself or a small company, where I can use whatever I want.
In most lines of work it's standard for the employer to pay for tools, not the worker. If anyone is cheap it's the capitalist bosses.
Paying for things that aren't worth it is noble, but not good economics in the long run. If people want to buy a tool not for what it produces but for the story it tells, this is fine. But just like startups need product-market fit, tools also need product-market fit, and if no one is buying, it could simply be that the alternatives are suitable replacements.
In other markets, that is called dumping, and it is illegal. And in fact, Microsoft was convicted of being a monopolist and dumping.
I agree. When people bemoan the death of lisp machines and RAD and whatnot, remember that we deserve it. We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this.
> damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools
I'm gonna pay for work. I'm not gonna pay for copy of some bytes. Especially not because lawyers say so.
Figure out a business model that doesn't require you to put a policeman behind my back to make it work. It's not that hard. Steam has one. GOG has one.
this is simply not true, in tech "free" software actually one of the most expensive software you can buy
There have been several iterations to have a unified way to build Android and iOS apps.
This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.This only works for devs who over time churn out as their app fails or becomes too big [1]
1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/
Good for you.
I meant as a general rule of thumb.
Genuinely curious: What does the number of installs have to do with anything? I didn't see anything about that in the linked post (which is brief, and only about React Native), and can't figure out how popularity of an app connects to which framework is used.
Would be interested to learn how this general rule of thumb works.
You said "fundamentally", not as a rule of thumb :)
> This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.
Well, I did work on a Flutter app with a tiny team between 2018-2021 and we had 15M installs, were app of the day, got featured multiple times in the App Store, got Google’s design award, were a preloaded app on iPhones in Apple Stores in several countries, and were overall doing quite well.
It was a very focused app though, so the size of our codebase didn’t really grow with the number of installs.
In the short-term it can work.
Over time maintenance becomes hard
New iOS and Android features, sometimes backward-incompatible are introduced.
And now, you need your dependencies to implement them. Which might or might not happen. At best, this makes usage inferior. At worst, you can no longer publish an update in app stores.
This app was started in 2017 and it is still running today and making (way more modest than back then) revenue. It’s just that I don’t work on it anymore.
This is a welcome addition but why should Flutter devs use this ?
Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications.
I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.
See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well.
> near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible)
Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are already starting to feel outdated.
Flutter's grim outlook has resulted in a surge of interest in Skip, and it was one of the drivers for us to open up the platform and catch the wave. If you love Dart, or if your apps don't need to look native (e.g., games or very bespoke interfaces), then Flutter might continue to be acceptable. But everyone else is starting to look elsewhere, especially in cases where their business depends on their apps feeling premium and native.
[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/170310
> Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions
To be fair reading those updates it sounds a lot more positive than this comment makes it seem. I.e. "they're pausing design updates while they figure out the best way to do it" rather than "they're not going to bother":
> This strategic pause on design updates gives us the space to ensure the long-term health and maintainability of Flutter's design libraries. We are committed to being transparent with our contributor community as we explore these options and will have more to share on our findings and future direction in the coming weeks.
and
> The material and cupertino libraries are being decoupled into standalone packages to accelerate feature development. All new work for iOS26 updates in Cupertino will happen in the new packages once established in flutter/packages.
Well sorry. But Android UI is bad just bad. The settings, the menus. Its bloated and almost as if they deliberately made it annoying to use. It just sucks.
that's just your biased opinion. the sooner you realise your in a cult the better
Dunno about Skip, but I can always tell when an app is Flutter. They feel like crap. Everything's a bit off with the native looking widgets. And fully custom designs still animate a bit weirdly. And they definitely still stutter. Somehow a tier below React Native.
Flutter re-generates the entire layout every tick and diffs it (immediate-mode), like a game engine. If your device isn't quite fast enough it'll lag, yep. RN is retained mode (but written in immediate-mode style and the diffing only happens when it has to).
Interesting, I didn’t know that it was immediate mode. According to the article [1] though, it now uses rendering engine with Retained Mode due to performance issues.
[1] https://medium.com/@0s.and.1s/flutter-part-iv-skia-vs-impell...
I'd say it's the opposite, on crappy devices, Flutter feels faster than native, not sure how but that's the end result. I've been testing on an old Samsung J3 and it's definitely better than native.
That's also maybe why it's so popular in India.
Flutter is fine if you don't care about performance, accessibility, have no need to access native capabilities or non-fluttered widgets (ex: the Google map integration is awful) and overall just want to make an internal app.
The cost of making an excellent flutter app is about the same you'd pay making fully native apps. Except that you're always paying for Skia's costs with Flutter.
This recommends 32GB to run _everything_, so xcode, gradle, emulators, simulators, etc. Not fully surprising.
Flutter doesn't use Skia anymore and you can absolutely bind to native libraries from Flutter with ease [0]. The current strategy (build hooks) is relatively new. You can also just write Kotlin or Swift for your application [1] using channel APIs. Finally, you can still have native pages in your app if needed for certain widgets [2] and still save time rewriting everything and all of your business logic for every single other page of the application that doesn't need those widgets. In fact, you can even mix native widgets and Flutter-rendered widgets in the same screen.
[0]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/bind-native-co...
[1]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/platform-chann...
[2]: https://docs.flutter.dev/add-to-app
And are comfortable making a 1-2 million dollar per devteam per year bet that Google won't rug pull you. And they seem to have no important or big app on it.
On an unrelated note, in 2024 Google did layoffs on the Flutter team.
That sounds like the worst parts of native dev + PWAs combined
Flutter still doesn't support liquid glass on iOS so it doesn't seem like a serious contender to me at this point. And due to the nature of how Flutter is implemented, it's going to continuously be an uphill battle. Maybe it's fine if you intend on having a completely custom UI and don't care about platform look and feel.
> Flutter still doesn't support liquid glass on iOS
Literally every iOS developer under the sun will tell me that this is a good thing.
Why? I'm an iOS developer and, while I don't love everything about liquid glass, that is the current design language of iOS.
I certainly don't think having my app sticking out like a sore thumb, using a design language from old outdated iOS versions is "a good thing"
No. I’m an iOS developer and will not tell you that, except to say it’s a good thing to have one more reason for the people not to use flutter.
That’s not a good thing if you don’t adapt liquid glass. I’m an iOS developer.
In general, the "render UI as if it were a video game" route feels like a bit of a dead end on mobile to me. On desktop it's more workable but still isn't without issues.
I've heard bad things about liquid glass and plan to skip that OS release, so not implementing it seems like an advantage from my perspective.
https://github.com/skiptools/skip
This is cool, but there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory.
This has a license: https://github.com/skiptools/skipstone but it vendors the other repo according to the readme? I am super confused about how this would work.
The Xcode build plugin in the /skip repo uses the binary created by /skipstone (which is the repository that was just opened).
Thanks for pointing out that the /skip repo itself doesn't have a license. We'll fix that asap!
LGPL3 has now been added: https://github.com/skiptools/skip/commit/7ad94680a801ca393fe...
Huh, what does one have to do to comply with the LGPL on iOS anyways?
I'm sort of surprised that only the largest plan ($5000/month) and not the ($10/$500/$2,500/month plans) includes a license that doesn't involve figuring that nonsense out.
Which non sense? The lesser GPL doesn’t mean you have to license your firstborn under the GPL license.
I think it’s fair to milk enterprise companies that can’t read a FSF license. Otherwise the LGPL is fine.
As I understand the LGPL - not a lawyer - you have to somehow enable all your users to relink your application against a different version of Skip (4.d.0 since 4.d.1 isn't possible on iOS). This means that your application must do something like include a copy of all the files that went into linking the application and convey that to the users along with your application, with scripts to build the application against a different version of Skip...
I can't imagine the app store would be particularly amused with this during app review... though I've never tried.
You can chill - it was their oversight that they’ve already corrected, not an omission by design
This is great news, thank you. I have been looking into a way to port Soundscape Community [1], a navigation app for the blind to Android without having two codebases to maintain. Skip looks ideal; I was planning on asking you about licensing for a very small team with almost no funding.
Someone else already asked about talkback accessibility; I assume it will work because it translates to native UI controls on android. Is that correct?
[1] https://github.com/soundscape-community/soundscape
Yes, as I just responded there, Skip uses the native toolkits and conventions on both platforms: SwiftUI on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android. So you automatically get the platforms' built-in accessibility support.
You can see a sample snippet at https://skip.dev/docs/components/accessibility/
"At least 32GB of memory is recommended for development with Skip."
Dear lord, what?
Well, you're running both the iOS development tools (Xcode, iOS Simulator), plus the Android development tools (Gradle, Android emulator, and maybe Android Studio too). These add up.
16GB might be possible, though.
(Skip itself doesn't take much memory. If you run it headlessly as a SwiftPM plugin, you wouldn't need nearly that much.)
Ah, yeah yeah, not meant as slight towards Skip (seems like a cool project). Just me being offended by the plain content of that sentence.
Do you have to run both at the same time? Because my flow with React Native is to focus on one platform at a time, I don't try to run everything in one shot.
No, you can configure it to just build and launch for iOS or Android separately. But we do recommend iterating on both in parallel for most of the UI work, just to make sure that everything stays in sync.
For framework/library development, you can of course build and test separately for each platform.
IDEs targeting mobile development saw the bloat in FPGA IDEs and said "we can beat that".
At current prices, if you do not already have 32GB RAM, it will cost over $300 for DDR5, and over $200 for DDR4...
yep, the pricing is getting ridiculous... on the other hand if you are using that 32gb to make money then its an investment thats worth it imo
I assume that’s for the development phase, not (necessarily) for apps developed with Skip
Likely because it uses both iOS and Android toolchains plus its own transpiler (with Skip Lite) or other overhead with Skip Fuse. iOS alone is already challenging with 16GB. Don't blame Skip for this - it's on Apple and Google for not shipping memory-efficient tooling, which shouldn't be a surprise if you've used their software.
Thank you for making it open-source (and free!) I looked into Skip before because I’d rather write native Swift than the in-between tangle of code that React Native tends to become. What prevented me from using it was the lack of case studies or apps in production. Has that changed? I looked on the homepage and couldn’t see any. Of course, I understand it might be a growing community and targeted to early adopters for now.
This is amazing! Thank you for open sourcing the project. It must have been a hard decision.
Thanks! It has been a long time coming.
As we mentioned in the post, developer tools really need to be freely obtainable in order to gain mass adoption. In that sense, it was an easy strategic decision. And we felt that the time was right, given that Skip's benefits are being thrust to the foreground in light of recent developments.
You should really consider why free software exists. Open source is open source, sure, but it is a disservice to your users to ever release proprietary software for any reason.
I personally would not start or run a business that didn’t release all software it builds under free software licenses. We don’t open source it because “developers expect it”, we open source it because it’s the right thing to do by your users.
Free software is an ideology, not just a license.
> Free software is an ideology, not just a license.
Yes and people shouldn't enforce ideology on top of each other. I am speaking this as an free software advocate too.
the fact of the matter is open source is still barely fundable and I am pretty sure that they evaluated multiple decisions to come up to this regarding how fundable it is and other factors.
If we have to indoctrinate someone into our ideology, it means that our ideology is unable to gain weight by its own merit. No, let open source do the work and welcome people for who are now open source. Have open arms to everyone who open sources their work & incentive them to do so with a happy heart.
Open source is about freedom. And being honest, If they wrote the code themselves, then its their freedom to have it in open source or not.
I for one, welcome another great open source! Thanks for going open source and Good luck to skip in future!
I know Open source has some issues regarding funding etc. so I hope that people donate to skip & make the project sustainable!
Have a nice day skip team!
Yeah but if that was the only reason to do open source that was encouraged then there’d almost certainly be a lot less open source software overall (and lower quality). Personally I’d prefer OSS win overall even if it costs some ideological purity.
I don’t open source my iOS apps that provide my living because there are many examples already of others using this to release identical apps without credit or sharing their work back (even with AGPL), which would remove my source of income that enables me to work on it in the first place. I haven’t found a way to make a living off open source yet for the type of products I produce.
I’m not independently wealthy to be able to afford to work for free. If I release my work for free, then I will have to live on the streets or in a cell, or take a job and lose the time I have to produce my work in the first place.
This is indeed a dilemma, but note that copyleft licenses like GPL or MPL do give you considerably more protection than a pushover license like MIT/BSD. I wrote about this last year at https://appfair.org/blog/gpl-and-the-app-stores.
It gives near zero practical protection as the devs that clone in the App Store do not respect licenses and Apple is slow to act (sometimes shutting your own dev account instead of the copycat’s, another high risk).
Enabling copycats also encourages them to target my apps for fake negative review spam and bot activity that gets my dev account (and personal iCloud) flagged and banned without recourse.
I also have no funds to sue someone. And the copycats are often anonymous and overseas in random countries, adding to the challenge of doing anything about it besides begging Apple to help without accidentally hurting me instead.
hey, came from the other comment you messaged me but this feels like such an apple issue which is so fixable that I am not understanding why Apple won't do it.
I understand what you are feeling but I feel like what you are saying is genuine and although sad right now, it provides a course of action for Apple to work upon to meaningfully improve it so that we can get atleast either custom license source available (as I mentioned in my other comment) or GPL/restrictive Copyleft as this mentions.
If someone from Apple's reading this. This feels such a large issue even more than the license issues in general, is Apple working on this or not?
This would honestly show the real loyalty towards developers if Apple can do this so I am waiting and perhaps a movement can be created to establish some formally written demands/ perhaps a change.org petition?
Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.
> Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.
Isn't there an EU law where if Enough signatures happen they are forced to discuss it in the EU parliament or similar? I remember this from the stop killing games movement iirc.
Mass organizations can take place too but why not a mix of both utilizing both regulations and mass organizations?
AGPL seems like a joke when it comes up against the indie hacker world. Has there ever been an example of an open-source maintainer successfully suing someone who ripped off their codebase without attribution? Doubtful.
Shame that the world has to be like this in the first place :<
Perhaps I am way too altruist at times & the world is capitalist without any discrimination, stealing anyone's work and reselling it feels so scummy and I have heard it happen actually so you are not actually completely in the wrong and its your code and your lifestyle and so I respect it. (Even if I am an open source advocate, I will admit making money from Open source is super hard in many cases)
Interestingly, what's your thoughts on Source available licenses. Like, honestly, like use a license which doesn't allow reusing components or providing another appstore release of that or similar
If you use github actions with immutable and other instances, I feel like there is a real way of like verifying that the code written is safe & people can verify it & trust it.
If people want to modify your product, they have to pay you and get in touch with you.
I will take this with additional security context and being able to audit over having nothing in the first place! (Hopefully I hope this might not impact your living either in any way and honestly even if you do this! Some of us would deeply appreciate it)
Something is better than nothing. If even much of the world goes to source available licenses, I feel like the transition to open source of softwares becomes much simpler as well if enough conditions (like people start donating/govts start investing in open source) etc. happen!
Source availability still provides one to that direction & is still overall positive with atleast in this context, virtually zero downsides.
What are your thoughts on it?
See my thoughts under sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712351
How is Skip compared to Jetbrains Compose and MAUI/Avalonia?
How is Skip’s support for building apps with maps or other more complex UIs? Can I build map overlays that work cross platform?
If I use Skip to make a cross-platform app, will TalkBack be able to read it to users as well as VoiceOver?
Yes, the unique benefit of Skip is that you are using the real native toolkits on both platforms. So you get both SwiftUI's accessibility support via VoiceOver, as well as Jetpack Compose's support via TalkBack.
Note: TalkBack is the best case scenario you're getting on Android. I've seen some abominations coming out of Samsung's implementation, and results will vary from device to device.
Still, assume people are using TalkBack and don't take reports from anything else, it'll prevent you from going insane.
That's awesome! My family has users of both, so this might be a convenient way to use a pleasant language to write mobile apps that all of my family members can play with.
Interesting. I used Expo recently and loved the development experience. I also built a simple iPhone app with Swift, and it was a decent experience. I have plans of building another iPhone app and was considering Swift again, which would make me miss building an Android app, but maybe Skip would allow me to do it anyways.
Biggest downside to SwiftUI development is lack of hot reloading. You can use the Inject framework but it’s fragile. This also makes it harder to iterate on with agents.
Small views and the preview canvas are your friend
Preview canvas is unusable by agents.
Small views don't solve this for human use either. The only solutions for fast builds are to stop using SPM and also to adopt the "microfeatures" pattern with interface stubs and dependency injection so that very little must be rebuilt/linked. This is a huge change for many projects and carries ongoing development maintenance overhead so it is not a trivial decision to make.
I just started to learn Kotlin, how does it compare with Kotlin Multi Platform for those that used both?
Good question. I'll try to answer as objectively as possible, despite my bias towards Skip's approach.
Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) enables you to target different platforms with your Kotlin. In the context of mobile apps, it allows you to compile your Kotlin to a native framework for iOS, so you can reuse your business logic. On iOS, the Kotlin is running in its own little garbage-collected runtime, but it sets up a bridge to Objective-C and Swift, so the iOS developers can communicate with it from their apps (the interface of which will typically be written separately for each platform). It is neat technology, and Skip integrates with it[1]. We were on their Talking Kotlin podcast in 2024 talking about it[2].
When targeting just the shared business logic and not the UI, Skip is, in some ways, the inverse of KMP: whereas they let you share Kotlin logic between the iOS and Android app, Skip lets you share the Swift logic. Skip operates in two different modes[3]: Skip Lite and Skip Fuse. Skip Lite is the original version of Skip, and transpiles your Swift into Kotlin. Skip Fuse is a later iteration and resulted from the formation of the Swift Android workgroup[4], of which we are founding members. In both modes, you can share your Skip business logic layer between multiple apps, and this is a popular application of Skip (e.g., see this talk at NSSpain[5]).
So that's the story for shared logic. Now onto the user interface part:
While I mentioned that Skip _can_ be used just for sharing business logic, it really shines when you build your whole app with it. You write your app in conventional SwiftUI, and Skip will translate it into the equivalent Jetpack Compose (which is now Android's official recommended way to build apps). Launching your app from Xcode will bring up both your iOS app in the simulator, and the equivalent Android app in the emulator. It is designed to be a single vertically-integrated app creation solution, and enables a single team (or a single developer) to iterate on both platforms at the same time, without any of the coordination overhead of building two separate apps for the two platforms.
KMP itself doesn't have an equivalent, but it does have a sibling project "Compose Multiplatform" (CMP), which is built on top of KMP and sort of does the opposite: it lets you write your app in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose and run it on iOS. But the way that it achieves this is different from Skip's approach: it doesn't use native controls on iOS, but instead paints pixels on the screen that mimic the native iOS UI (à la Flutter). The results are predictable: an uncanny valley UI that doesn't feel _quite_ right, and that struggles to keep up with the platform conventions. Notably, like Flutter, they won't be able to support Liquid Glass in any convincing form, and so apps built with it are going to be stuck on outdated iOS UI conventions. In short: CMP is native on Android but alien on iOS, whereas Skip is native on both platforms.
That's our take on the difference between the two. In fairness to KMP, they do have some distinct advantages in terms of reach: whereas Skip is squarely focused on just mobile platforms, KMP can target desktops and the web as well. If that is a priority for you, or you already have a lot of Kotlin experience or are invested in the ecosystem, then KMP might be a good fit for your needs. But if you like Swift and SwiftUI, and are happy working with the Apple developer tools, then you should give Skip a try. It really is magic.
[1]: https://skip.dev/blog/skip-and-kotlin-multiplatform/
[2]: https://talkingkotlin.com/going-from-swift-to-kotlin-with-sk...
[3]: https://skip.dev/docs/modes/
[4]: https://www.swift.org/android-workgroup/
[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIGl6GOo210
> KMP itself doesn't have an equivalent
Are you sure about that?
https://code.cash.app/native-ui-and-multiplatform-compose-wi...
Does it support MacOS as well? I didn't spot any explicit statement about that but I guess SwiftUI should support that automatically.
Yes, SwiftUI supports macOS automatically.
> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge.
I've run into this too with my own app. I thought people would like a Lua GUI framework that's professional grade and gives you full access to WinAPI via Lua. I was using DragonRuby as my model.
So I wasted a thousand hours making the app and its documentation. Turns out, even after people understood what it was (I suck at marketing), everyone still agreed that whatever it could become or ever evolve into was still not worth a dime.
Now I'm faced with a decision. Do I open source it? I think, no. What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.
Then, should I open source it altruistically? What for? First of all, giving things away for free is not inherently good. One negative side effect is teaching people not to rely on their own industry. Another is that they may use it for evil. And then, it feels like such a waste to let the code die out.
But everything eventually goes to waste.
The point of open-sourcing is to put it on peoples’ map at all.
Development tools have to be fully dependable (maintained, no rug pull) and proprietary software just carries too much risk in that regard for a lot of people.
> What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.
I encourage you to find a way out of this belief, or at least least fend it off as long as possible.
You can see from recent HN postings that most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.
>most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.
You don't have to. Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because less devs are needed for the same level of output) is just as bad.
Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because the AI industry imploded and the devs from that industry are now in the market) is just as bad.
The rise of companies you might end up where some/most the codebase or db schemas were vibe generated is just as bad. LLMs are the new VB6. At least, with VB6 the initial complexity of the apps would be limited by how much the cowboy coder could handle (ie. not infinite). With LLMs that limit is an order of magnitude higher. I expect many of the future legacy apps to be dangerous jungles of vibes many contractors will be urgently hired to immediately fix when things begin behaving weirdly and the causes of the issue are hidden somewhere in the jungle.
Any of the above is bad enough on its own, let alone combined. I strongly believe two of the above will happen within the next 5 years.
Third possibility negates the first two.
Also, did VB6 put anyone out of work?
Did you reach out to Lua heavy shops?
The path frameworks usually go: open source some of it and paywall extras or some related service. Look at Expo or Next.js.
It’s bold to assume people will spend money on something they can’t see in action and don’t know whether it will fit their needs.
Hey! (firstly recognized you from your other post on HN)
Personally I would love the idea of creating a lua application natively. You don't know how much I wanted it now that you mention it.
I remember looking for such solutions,finding none, then I even thought of using kotlin apps with lua integration but didn't like the idea of learning kotlin
For some reason, even though I have only played just a little bit with lua, there are tons of options which compile down to lua which can make it really powerful too and so for the end developer, there are tons of possibilities and it starts out being so simple!
I think the problem with lua was that there is a lack of libraries & projects regarding it so this might actually help it
I have another question tho and I'd love it if you can answer it.
Is there any way that I can write a cli application in golang or port it to something with just glue code being lua and using it for android somehow?
I don't want to create an android application in golang itself for what its worth because I find the primitive a little lacking (what do I use, wails?)
I have heard people use python kite or something iirc which looked good but python-go support isn't the best & i dont even know if its on android
If you can actually provide lua as the UI/UX support (I am imagining something simple but powerful) with code being allowed in other languages where I can get some powerful libraries (golang), I would be super interested in it.
Regarding Open source, I would personally trust the project a lot more if this was open source.
That being said, I understand the worry of changing careers/consultancy/AI marketing because I am still a teenager in high school. I have anxiety because I have an exam for the colleg ein 2 days, I am a bit cooked haha but I guess I just gotta try
Your fears are valid and somehow I imagine you in a position wayy similar to raylib & I remembered this post.
https://gist.github.com/raysan5/04a2daf02aa2a6e79010331f77bf...
Honestly, what are your thoughts in teaching at a college about app development with lua, I mean I am a teenager and I would die for such a course!
Although I was never into roblox, some of my friends were and they treat lua as the holy grail because of roblox development and roblox's development community is from what I can gather decently respected especially if you are teen, some even learn lua just for it.
so you can get people who are interested in already having some gui experience with lua (more in a game environment but still) and you tell them that you can make apps with it just as easily? People will be hooked.
Of course there is some LLM but honestly, nobody cares. LLM's wont be able to recreate your project, I am mostly sure of it.
Marketing is something that I relate with too because we never know what the public really really wants.
I mean, I will admit it, We people are kind of hypocrites (speaking from my behalf)
Sometimes we would open source project and want it to be sustainable without paying the devs or donating to them, that sucks. Some of us just want open source for ideological reasons and um, honestly, I will admit it. It's your code, do what you want it, you built it and you should be proud of it!
We can only give suggestions but I recommend you to create some video of the project so that I can see it.
App developments are fucking nightmares. I had even thought of using godot just to create app development. Any new solution provided decent enough can absolutely help.
Personally I believe you should wait for some time & try to write a blog post about it. I want to hear all the nerdy details!
Create a show HN post, I saw tomhow mention to me how much of the audience wants originality and the idea of "aha moments"/something novel. Provide us with knowledge of what aha moments did you discover during building this, I am soo curious myself!
Good luck man and I genuinely hope the best of luck for you man! Just message me whenever you feel like it or mail me, Will try to respond to ya if you ever need my help (I don't think so but I'd love to playtest what you are mentioning too!)
Oh yea just a teeny bti suggestion adding on that golang one, can you just make it so that I can have a very simple and easy/fast way of compiling golang cli applications into gui android applications with lua code. I personally want this so bad because there are soo many good and lovely open source golang cli and I wanted to be part of f-droid by creating an application gui for some golang cli tool we might use but it felt sooooooo hard that I gave up. (Yes I even used tauri and ended up waking up till 5 am debugging)
The pain point's definitely real and LLM's won't be able to make this. Only the people like you who are truly passionate about such projects can make it. It's a unique project and you should be proud of it and I hope that the project has a good future!
I wish there are something for SwiftUI on Windows. I meant to support Windows for Draw Things, but the opportunity cost is too high without proper UI tooling.
Note that Swift/WinRT by The Browser Company does not qualify, as it’s one layer too low (directly exposes the Windows framework): https://github.com/thebrowsercompany/swift-winrt
However it seems like it could be a good basis for such a project.
Closest thing is SwiftCrossUI. Maybe Skip will come to Windows one day.
What big/famous apps are using Skip?
The reasoning for making this choice was refreshingly sober and clear-minded. If there was anything that would help tooling reach critical mass, it's turning it into OSS.
I've built with Flutter and React Native a few times over the years, but I will give Skip a go in my next project, I've heard a lot actually.
is there product level app that handle really "complex" interaction or somebody really use this (other than template project in example gallery)
because after experiencing flutter/RN, crossplatform framework/tools really hard to get right and this is with fb and google resources btw.
sometimes you must really deep in shit and realize that you make mistake to choose these technology
Welp atleast they make it more easier for us non-Apple Developer to make an App