I'm just getting started in iOS development as a hobby, but what does this mean? Can I now build my app in Xcode with an Android target and use that binary in the Play Store? It surely can't be that easy now is it?
> Can I now build my app in Xcode with an Android target and use that binary in the Play Store?
No. The vision document[1] lays out the direction of travel. Currently the focus is on shared business logic and libraries, rather than full native applications (although that's certainly a goal, albeit a very long term one).
The SDK doesn't quite work that way, your iOS-specific dependencies like SwiftUI and UIKit aren't available. For SwiftUI development, [Skip](https://skip.tools/) has a transpiler that translates your SwiftUI code into Jetpack Compose.
Without Skip, you can still share other code through JNI - similar to Kotlin Multiplatform.
Not yet, and possibly not ever quite from Xcode. But using Swift CLI tools, yes.
The example Activty I saw is pretty rough ergonomically, but I have no doubt an ergonomic, SwiftUI-like library could be built on top of what’s currently there and/or on the roadmap.
objclxt|4 months ago
No. The vision document[1] lays out the direction of travel. Currently the focus is on shared business logic and libraries, rather than full native applications (although that's certainly a goal, albeit a very long term one).
[1]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/pull/2946/files
thenaturalist|4 months ago
This doc you linked is from August.
The blog post from today includes, in fact at the very top an XCode Swift project emulating a Pixel 9.
The docs include a detailed Getting Started for Android and they even have an Android examples repo.
Hence the SDK.
By all means, it very much is possible to build Android Swift apps in XCode.
https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/swift-sdk-for-a...
joanniso|4 months ago
Without Skip, you can still share other code through JNI - similar to Kotlin Multiplatform.
Larrikin|4 months ago
But it's not there yet
marcprux|4 months ago
(disclaimer: I work on the Skip.tools product)
samtheprogram|4 months ago
The example Activty I saw is pretty rough ergonomically, but I have no doubt an ergonomic, SwiftUI-like library could be built on top of what’s currently there and/or on the roadmap.
brookst|4 months ago
Same way there are C compilers for Windows and Linux, but that does not mean binary compatibility.