Skip

Skip is a tool that transpiles your SwiftUI iOS app into a Kotlin Jetpack Compose app, and enables you to use a single language to create a complete app that reaches the entire mobile marketplace. What it is: Skip stands in contrast to other cross-platform development tools like Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin, in that it enables the creation of genuinely native applications for both of the dominant mobile platforms. It doesn't embed a separate engine or runtime into your app, but instead lets you use pure Swift and SwiftUI to create the iOS side of the app (as per Apple's recommended best practices for creating iOS apps), and transpiles it into a pure Kotlin and Jetpack Compose app for the Android side (which is Google's recommendation for building Android apps). So your application will use platform-native controls and will automatically have all the affordances provided by the platform vendor: animations, accessibility, and future-proof evolution alongside OS updates. How it works: you build a Skip app using the same tools that you use to create a standard iOS app: Xcode, Swift, and SwiftUI. Skip augments this workflow with a Swift Package Manager plugin called "skipstone", which transpiles your Swift into Kotlin each time you build your app, and launches the Android app side-by-side with the iOS app each time you run the app. The transpilation works not just on your primary app module, but also transitively processes all your dependent SwiftPM modules, so you can break complex projects down into individually testable sub-modules containing business logic or UI code. In fact, this is how our own adaptor modules for the standard frameworks are structured: SkipFoundation adapts the Foundation framework and SkipUI adapts the SwiftUI framework, so the same familiar API can be used when building the app. And there's a GitHub ecosystem of open-source modules supporting popular frameworks, including SQLite, Firebase, Lottie, and many other common building blocks of modern apps. Over the past year Skip has evolved into a fully-capable solution for creating best-in-class apps for both iOS and Android. And today we are delighted to announce the release of version 1.0, meaning that it is ready for production use. We have a wealth of videos and documentation available at https://skip.tools, and I'll be around to field any questions that any of you might have. Thanks in advance for taking a look!

Ohhh, congrats on the launch! Is this the tool we've all been waiting for? I think it is! native components for both OS's is GREAT! One question though; I can imagine there are components that are specifically built for iOS or Android. How do you handle those differences?

Hey @mwp this looks amazing. I'm a cross platform developer myself. I use a different stack, but I know the pain of developing for iOS, Android and the Web at the same time 😅 How is Skip handling Android specific things like the back button, side-nav, asset generation and so on? Congrats on the launch 🚀

Congrats on the launch, @mwp ! Skip's approach to using Swift for both iOS and Android is revolutionary. How does it handle platform-specific features like Android's back button or iOS's gesture navigation? Would love to hear more about the challenges you faced during development.

Wow, @mwp, The ability to use Swift for both iOS and Android while maintaining genuine native performance is a sweet deal. It's great to see you moving away from the typical cross-platform woes with a unique approach. I'm especially intrigued by how you've incorporated Swift Package Manager and the "skipstone" plugin to streamline the workflow. As a developer, the thought of breaking down complex projects into sub-modules and still keeping everything in the same language is a dream come true! Can't wait to dive into the documentation and check out those open-source modules on GitHub. This could really be the next MVP in our toolkit! Upvoted for sure!

congrats on your launch 🚀 I’m really impressed by the concept! While frameworks like Flutter and React Native offer cross-platform solutions, as a developer, I’ve never felt they were perfect. Skip’s approach of achieving cross-platform development with native languages feels like a well-balanced and innovative solution.

Sounds interesting, but I've seen similar claims from Flutter and React Native, isn't this just another cross-platform thing that's gonna perform worse than native dev, might be good for startups but kinda skeptical about its performance and long-term usability without proprietary runtimes, anyone tried it and had a good experience?