The NextSTEP people have all retired. The real canary in the coalmine was the release of SwiftUI, which to this day is unusable for real UI work, and yet they keep pushing it. A company that once prided itself on its polished user interfaces, is pushing a fundamentally broken UI framework (they even customized the Swift language itself to make it work!), for no sensible reason, other than to pander to web developers socialized on React.

It's a tired trope, but Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.

I’m an old school Cocoa dev. I even wrote the UI for a bunch of the built in apps on your iPhone.

I love SwiftUI. I know it inside and out and I’ve talked to its creators. It’s not “done” yet but it is a joy to use. And its power is in saving you from doing “the other 80%” of the work for all the myriad a11y jobs most people don’t bother doing.

Yes of course it panders to web devs. Apple has the same problem MSFT did when webapps with js were invented: if good software can exist in the browser, who cares what OS you have?

SwiftUI is existential for Apple. They are betting the farm on it and Liquid Glass in the hope that native apps are more appealing to users than web apps.

Apple dies if everyone moves to a Google desktop and mobile stack.

Both SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose rewrites, despite all their issues, are still miles ahead on WinUI turned out to be after five years, this is how bad Windows desktop development has become.