Tokamak VS SwiftWebUI

https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak

I’m also working (slowly) on native Flutter channels:

https://github.com/PADL/FlutterSwift

But this is really targeted at embedded use cases.

There is Tokamak but I don't know how usable it is just yet.

TokamakUI runs via SwiftUI on WASM for web. Apple just hired the creator of the framework.

You can even make web apps by creating web components in swift with Tokamak.

I am playing around with Tokamak just for a bit of fun and learning, and it's been pretty solid so far! Though I want to branch out and play with some dynamic data from a random API, instead of just using mocked/pre-populated data.

There is SwiftWasm that compiles swift into WebAssembly so you can run it in the browser, but swift can't directly manipulate the DOM so you'd still need JavaScript or something like TokamakUI so you can design the front-end portion of your app.

I wonder how far you could get using something like https://github.com/carson-katri/SwiftWebUI to render the Swift app to a webview for the other platforms... I’ve not tried it, I imagine there might be jank and limitations as it’s “a toy project” but with some work could be a legit option - I’ve run pretty bespoke and complex React Native applications as desktop apps via react-native-web and Electron and it worked incredibly well.

I do like the idea of only maintaining a single codebase, but of course it comes with significant trade offs. The idea of building for Apple-first but automatically getting a reasonable fallback for other platforms is quite appealing - as you say, for many businesses it probably makes sense to focus on having the most polished iOS experience possible.

Honestly I’ve been quite impressed with the end results we’ve got from React Native, but you are always going to be lagging behind the native platform.