dfabulich 2 days ago

You can use Swift on Android today with Skip Tools. https://skip.tools/ The Skip devs are founding members of the Swift on Android working group.

When using Skip Fuse, your Swift code compiles to 100% native Android ARM code.

They've also reimplemented ~60% of SwiftUI on Android, in an open-source library, SkipUI. https://github.com/skiptools/skip-ui SkipUI works way better than you'd think, and anyway, it's totally optional.

You can just write Swift against native Android APIs and it works fine.

  • bentocorp a day ago

    If Apple was really serious about combating the use of Electron and other cross-platform frameworks they would seriously support (and possibly even fund) a tool like this.

    Despite the issues, if Swift and SwiftUI were available and compelling for Android then it may help to give Apple greater mindshare of developers.

    • akmarinov a day ago

      If Apple cared, they would’ve just included “no cross-platform apps” in their Appstore ToS and they’d be dead the next day.

      That’s how Apple fights problems these days - gatekeeping and regulation.

      They don’t care though, cross platform apps bring money the same way as any app

zerr 2 days ago

Did they finish porting the core lib to Windows?

  • CharlesW 2 days ago

    Foundation (the Swift Standard Library), Dispatch (the concurrency library), and XCTest (the testing framework) are all available and functional on Windows.

    • zerr 2 days ago

      I remember some crucial parts were not implemented a few months ago.

4b11b4 2 days ago

Does this help LiveView Native efforts?

(naive question)

bestouff 2 days ago

I always found non-native apps too out-of-place. Please use Swift on iOS and Kotlin on Android.

  • mattl 2 days ago

    Swift is just a programming language, I thought?

    • v5v3 2 days ago

      Yes.

      Unless I am also mistaken, they are seeking to make a supported language to android development.

      Which will save mobile devs having to learn two languages, and also allow reuse of code.

      • mhast 2 days ago

        Kotlin multiplatform has been around for some time if you want that. But I guess it makes sense to be able to approach it from the other end as well if you're mainly an iOS shop.

        • v5v3 2 days ago

          It's the only approach that can be taken, as Android being open source can make Swift a first class supported language. Apple will be apple.

      • mattl 2 days ago

        Yeah Swift isn’t SwiftUI.

        • bestouff 5 hours ago

          That's theoretically right, but all concrete examples I've seen so far use some generic UI framework that don't work well.