Ask HN: What Is the State of App Development in 2026?

1. Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

   1 283 23,282 10.0 C#

   .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.

   

2. SaaSHub

   www.saashub.com featured

   SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

   

3. Axiom

   2 4 1,031 9.8 Go

   Battle-tested Claude Code skills for modern xOS (iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS) development (by CharlesWiltgen)

   

   My perspective/bias: I've been supporting and working with Mac and iOS developers since the late 90s, when Apple moved me from Chicago to be an evangelist at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I also know as much as anyone about AI-assisted development, as the creator/maintainer of the free/open source Axiom (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/) for iOS/macOS devs.

   It's not as dire as you might think. To software developers, the "AI revolution" is largely what the "desktop publishing revolution" was to designers. Yes, it meant the "riff raff" could theoretically play with the pros. Some percentage of the riff raff became pros. Most of the pros eventually adopted the tools and techniques used by the riff raff. Some of the pros didn't survive the transition and happily retired, their rubylith, Letraset type, and rubber cement retiring with them.

   The silver lining is that most of a software engineer's job isn't coding, it's thinking. LLMs can't do that, and we're not getting to AGI with current AI architectures. LLMs can amplify thinking, and an LLM in the hands of a software engineer or architect is at least two orders of magnitude more effective than it can be in the hands of a vibe coder. As LLMs get better for vibe coders, they also get better for pros.

   One can argue that, by the end of the decade, hand-coded Swift may be considered as unnecessary as hand-coded assembly has been for decades. But coding in modern languages is already 7-8 levels of abstraction above the metal. One more level of abstraction is not the death of software engineering, IMO.

4. ios-developer-tools

   3 1 1,778 - Swift

   Tools that every iOS developer should know.

   

   I just do iOS development and my opinion is this: Start with XCode then use an LLM to design and develop it out from there its great. The newer models work great with project files where they used to struggle. Using the Visual Code development tools alongside XCode, claude skills and 3rd party libraries and frameworks with SwiftUI and Swift 5/6 is really convincing me I should make apps full time again. Coding apps has become my dream job.

   https://github.com/LeoMobileDeveloper/ios-developer-tools

   https://github.com/AvdLee/SwiftUI-Agent-Skill

5. SwiftUI-Agent-Skill

   4 2 2,939 - Python

   Add expert SwiftUI Best Practices guidance to your AI coding tool (Agent Skills open format). (by AvdLee)

   

   I just do iOS development and my opinion is this: Start with XCode then use an LLM to design and develop it out from there its great. The newer models work great with project files where they used to struggle. Using the Visual Code development tools alongside XCode, claude skills and 3rd party libraries and frameworks with SwiftUI and Swift 5/6 is really convincing me I should make apps full time again. Coding apps has become my dream job.

   https://github.com/LeoMobileDeveloper/ios-developer-tools

   https://github.com/AvdLee/SwiftUI-Agent-Skill

6. Kotlin-BLE-Library

   5 1 510 - Kotlin

   

   > and the bluetooth libraries across different devices (particularly in Android land) has me concerned.

   I work on the Android side for a company that develops an external bluetooth device (not a wearable, but similar enough) and the bluetooth library situation has certainly been an issue to be concerned about.

   Using the default Android bluetooth SDK "raw" is fraught with potential problems, at the very least you need some sort of added message queue type system built on top since it does none of this for you. You also have to contend with a lot of strange device specific issues (of the type "works fine on 99% of Android devices, this one Samsung device has a driver quirk we need to work around", etc).

   Things looked pretty good with the Jetpack androidx.bluetooth library as a higher level abstraction, but Google deprecated it and stopped working on it before it left alpha.

   After lots of investigations and iterations I ended up using Nordic Semiconductor's 2.0 BLE Library, which is technically also still in alpha release, but is much more stable than that designation suggests.

   https://github.com/nordicsemi/Kotlin-BLE-Library

   After having messed with all of the options, I highly recommend Nordic's library as a solid basis for using Bluetooth in modern Android/Kotlin, but in your specific situation I'm not sure if bridging it to Rust would be less or more painful than having an LLM generate a Rust wrapper over the raw android.bluetooth library.

7. powerflow

   6 1 343 - Vue

   macOS App for monitoring power usage and charging status

   

   From the perspective of this intermediate/hobbyist level Python amateur who never quite got to grips with Swift, it's a paradigm shift. For all manner of simple-ish personal apps, Claude can one-shot an MVP in a few minutes, pulling all of the Swift/UI boilerplate together (which would have taken me hours if not days via tutorials) which I can then easily tweak and iterate to my heart's content.

   It also supports the 'native is better' apprpach. For example, I recently started with Powerflow [0] which I really like except for the size of it, and created a Swift version [1] in an hour of Claude plus manual tweaks. It's been running quietly on my laptop ever since.

   The downside is that it brings Apple's iOS restrictions into sharper relief: being able to easily write widgets and apps to suit my needs but then being unable to run then for longer than a week on my own hardware without paying $99 a year is especially frustrating.

   [0] https://github.com/lzt1008/powerflow

8. powerflow-swift

   7 1 0 - Swift

   

9. anki

   8 1,163 28,939 9.6 Rust

   Anki is a smart spaced repetition flashcard program

   

10. Anki-Android-Backend

    9 2 88 8.3 Kotlin

    JNI bridge between AnkiDroid and Anki Desktop's rust code

    

11. Anki-Android

    10 235 11,330 9.9 Kotlin

    AnkiDroid: Anki flashcards on Android. Your secret trick to achieve superhuman information retention.

    

12. buttplug-rs

    11 140 1,207 9.6 Rust

    Rust Implementation of the Buttplug Sex Toy Control Protocol

    

    Thanks for the info. We're using https://buttplug.io/ currently.

    After reviewing a bunch of packages, one of our devs decided this was probably the best available. I'll mention the new Nordic, as we are based on nrf chips.

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