I would like to pragmatically consider choosing to start development of new app in Swift right now (iOS 8 beta 3).  App that I actually intent to ship and support. Everybody I know, listen to, read and follow quite sanely suggest to stick with Obj-C for now. “It’s way too early, Swift is way to buggy, syntax is subject to change and incomplete”. And of course I have to agree. If you are indie and working on your bread and butter project, you are going to continue develop in Obj-C . Trusted tool you know inside out and are able to develop effectively. Needless to say your customers don’t care about what language is your app written in. It just does not make business sense right now. Same goes if you are working as project lead or contractor for a start-up. You are going to choose to start a new project in  Obj-C, it is easier and cheaper to hire skilled, competent Obj-C devs. I must mention some people are divining into Swift early for academic reasons. Also if you want to influence shaping of language, now is the time. I do however want to look at it from purely pragmatic angle. I want to see wether there is a business case for writing app in swift right now.

Let’s look one year out into the future. Points described in first paragraph are going to be harder to argue for. I assume there will still be lot of development done in Obj-C. It’s reasonable safe assumption that people are not going to rewrite their apps in Swift 12 months from now. If you are going to be starting a new project you are at the very least strongly going to consider writing it in Swift.

It is hard to imagine that Swift is not going to be norm in two years from now. There will be high demand for experienced  Swift developers.  iOS development market’s demand vs. supply ratio is still pretty much in favour of developers. iOS developers are still kinda “hot shit”. It is unreasonable to think it will stay this way forever. In the world where Yo! app gets $1.000.000 funding, where What’sApp gets bought for $17 billion, it’s reasonable to be considered about possibility of being in a market bubble. So it is plausible to image that in two years time, we might find there are far fewer iOS jobs out there. In this scenario, having demonstrable experiences with Swift development, ever since it’s been released, will certainly be plus while looking for a Job. As for indie development, it is unlikely, however possible that Apple will start shipping Swift only frameworks or deprecates Obj-C altogether sooner than we think. In that scenario knowing all the ins and outs of Swift will be crutial  for staying in business.

So there, I have managed to convince myself to start a new project in Swift right now. It’s definitely not the right choice for everyone and it might turn out to be wrong choice for me as well. I have only mentioned pragmatic reasons here. Apart from that there is plenty of exciting stuff about Swift that makes me motivated and intrigued about it, but that’s for another post. SWIFT ON !