Survey: Which Swift Frameworks Are Used in Production in 2024

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Survey: Which Swift Frameworks Are Used in Production

The Swift ecosystem continues to actively evolve: from mobile development for iOS and iPadOS to native applications for macOS, watchOS, and server-side solutions. But which frameworks are actually used in real commercial projects, and not just in tutorials? We conducted a survey among Swift developers working on production products and are sharing the results.

Survey Methodology

The survey involved 340 Swift developers from Russia and CIS countries. Respondents are specialists with commercial development experience ranging from 1 year to 10+ years. Participants selected the main frameworks used in their current production projects (iOS/macOS). Multiple answers were allowed.

Top 5 Swift Frameworks in Production

SwiftUI — 78% of respondents. The main framework for building interfaces. Despite its youth (2019), SwiftUI has surpassed UIKit in frequency of use in new projects. Main reasons: declarative syntax, automatic adaptation to dark mode and Dynamic Type.
Combine — 62% of respondents. A framework for reactive programming. Used for handling asynchronous events, binding data to the UI, and working with network requests. Especially popular in combination with SwiftUI.
UIKit — 55% of respondents. Still in demand for maintaining legacy projects and applications requiring fine-grained interface customization or support for older iOS versions (below 13.0).
Alamofire — 48% of respondents. The most popular third-party framework for working with HTTP requests. Simplifies writing the network layer, supports interceptors, serialization, and caching.
Core Data / SwiftData — 41% of respondents. Frameworks for working with local databases. SwiftData is a 2023 newcomer, and it is already being actively adopted in production (used by 18% of respondents).

Unexpected Results

Vapor — 12% of respondents. A server-side Swift framework used for creating REST APIs and microservices. Still a niche solution, but its popularity is growing: in 2022 it was only at 7%.
Realm — 9% of respondents. An alternative to Core Data from MongoDB. Despite its convenience, it loses to Apple's built-in solutions.
RxSwift — 8% of respondents. Previously a leader in reactive programming, it now lags behind Combine due to native integration with the Apple ecosystem.

What Is Used for macOS?

We separately highlighted development for macOS. Here, the leaders are AppKit (old projects) and SwiftUI (new ones). Also popular is Sparkle — a framework for automatic application updates. It is used by 23% of respondents working with macOS products.

Conclusions

The main trend of 2024 is the transition to SwiftUI and Combine as the primary stack for new projects. UIKit remains in maintenance, but new features in production are already being built on SwiftUI. For server-side development, Swift has not yet become mainstream, but Vapor shows steady growth. If you are just starting to learn Swift