Reading up on swift
12 deep · digging since jan 22
- Helix: The internal tool powering our Shopify app's native migration (2026) - Shopify
Helix uses small checkpoints and strict quality gates to reliably rebuild the Shopify app from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin.
- Xcode - Apple Developer
The Xcode product page touts new AI features and testing tools, while an archived HN discussion from Xcode 7 reveals developer frustration with costs and tooling gaps.
- Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
Shopify is abandoning React Native for its mobile apps and rewriting them natively in Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android.
- Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify (2026) - Shopify
Shopify is moving its major mobile apps from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin, using LLMs to cut the cost of building and maintaining features twice.
- Use boring languages with LLMs
Using boring languages like Go with LLMs reduces variance in training data, leading to more predictable and reliable code generation.
- I vibe coded my dream macOS presentation app
Simon Willison describes creating a custom macOS presentation app using AI-assisted vibe coding in Swift, which sequences URLs as slides and includes a phone-based remote control via Tailscale.
- Skip is now free and open source
Skip, a tool for building cross-platform mobile apps with SwiftUI, is now free and open source, though it requires macOS and at least 32GB of RAM for development.
Takes
https://x.com/sindresorhus/status/2108672491694825533 I wrote a blog post about the new website. Why Swift and how it works. https://sindresorhus.com/blog/swift-website
@sindresorhus
Just shipped a redesign of my website: https://sindresorhus.com/apps It's now fully in Swift and compiled to HTML/CSS.
@sindresorhus
I¹ ported my Mini web browser to Rust & Swift. It's faster, more secure, and shockingly, nicer to iterate on than Electron + Bun. I always wanted Safari-like UX but… Chrome 😁. Thanks to the 𝚌𝚎𝚏 crate, I can bundle up-to-date Chromium. 𝚏𝚡 𝚊𝚌𝚙 lets me embed an agent without bloating the app. It talks to my local fx CLI over ACP. fx can then manage the browser via an MCP server². By ditching Electron, I was able to get Liquid Glass, faster boots, and a more Mac-native feeling. Little things like fine-grained focus and input control, which are nightmare fuel in JS, just work®. Native is the future, both on the desktop and in the cloud. I suspect the entire software world will "nativify" faster than people realize, as DHH hinted at Rails World. Excited that Vercel's bet on Fluid will help support this, whether you choose to go Rust, Go, Zig, scriptc… ¹ Built on
@rauchg
Who wants to try the new Notion Calendar on iOS? Unlike the main Notion app, this one is a RN→Swift rewrite. Good news! We've now offended all technologists equally. Web view lovers, RN lovers, and (historically) Swift lovers. 😅
@mschoening
Shopify is moving from React Native to Native
@mustafa01ali