UIKit do I even need it in 2021?

Whether you are deciding to learn SwiftUI or UIKit as of September/2021, both frameworks are great to learn and try out, and both can deliver a great app.

However, let’s keep this article about UIKit and to the big question here:

Do I Need to learn UIKit in 2021? Is it must?

Yes. For most cases.

but WHY is that? You’re asking me.

• If you want to be an indie App developer and you want to support iOS 12.x
• SwiftUI supports only : iOS 13, macOS 10.15, tvOS 13, and watchOS 6, and above.
• If you are planning to search for a job in the iOS development market, most published apps are still using UIKit as the main UI framework. So having UIKit knowledge is a MUST.

Let’s see the Job market in Indeed and Search for jobs in NY:
SwiftUI only got like 33 vacancies available:

But when you search for iOS Developer you got 785 available vacancies.

Try it out where you live and search for yourself.

Moreover:

• Numerous UIKit APIs are still not ported to SwiftUI, such as (ImagePicker, DocumentPicker,…).
• Even though ImagePicker(UIKit) its equivalent in SwiftUI is PHPicker, the trick here PHPicker in SwiftUI does only support iOS 14+ tricky right? I concluded that too.
• UIKit has been in the iOS world since iOS 2.0, this is over a decade. We are talking here about a really mature framework.
• Most Apps even when using SwiftUI still need some UIKit components.
• UIKit is expected to coexist with SwiftUI at least another 4 years+. Even then many apps will still depend heavily on UIKit.

As a conclusion, Learning UIKit is a must nowadays, I advise new iOS developers to master UIKit before moving to SwiftUI. It might be a nightmare for you if you decided in the future to move from SwiftUI to UIKit. Hence, UIKit as a start then move to SwiftUI.

Thank you for reading this article.
I hope you’ve learned something new today.
Until next time.

Make sure to follow me on twitter: @codeWithMoses

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