Alternatives to Xcode

Alternatives to Xcode and Swift 2022

Xcode is crap. Swift is crap. Cocoapods is crap. Developing on iOS is crap.

Why?

  • You have to keep buying the latest Mac computers
  • No legacy support
  • Extremely fast upgrades from Xcode 7 to Xcode 13 in a few years with no new features at all
  • Swift 2 to Swift 5 – again no new features

The whole upgrade process is just to annoy developers; If there was a movement to boycott Xcode I would be part of it and would even donate money to the cause to raise awareness and help it. Apple is also actively removing Apps that haven’t been updated in a couple of years from the App Store even when the app functions perfectly well.

Finally there are solutions out there that offer developers a way out and that is Flutter https://flutter.dev/ this is the future of mobile app development as you only need to write once and you can output to iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS/X… Furthermore you can publish to the highly dysfunctional digital labyrinth more commonly known as the Apple App Store without even having to possess a Apple Mac computer. Flutter removes all of the headaches associated with different versions of Swift and different versions of Mac OS X and also saves the developer from having to develop separately for Android. It is the future now and I sincerely hope it would spell the end of Xcode.

Comments on Apple Forum that get deleted:-

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/109434?login=true&page=1#711603022

This is why we are moving away from Xcode; The design of Xcode is not backward compliant and you need to keep many MACs for legacy reasons and need to keep buying new MACs so that latest OS would run…..

What’s the different between Swift 2 and Swift 5? To be honest, I don’t see any….

I’m using Flutter nowadays and automate deployment using a free service called fastlane.tools for output to iOS; save myself a lot of headache and time….

Time to put Xcode in the bin.