Survey: Which Swift Frameworks Are Used in Production in 2024

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Survey: Which Swift Frameworks (iOS/macOS) Are Used in Production

The Swift ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, and choosing the right framework for a production project is becoming an increasingly responsible task. A recent survey among iOS and macOS developers, conducted by the Swift.org community and supported by major IT companies, shed light on the real state of affairs: which technologies are actually used in the field, and which remain experimental.

More than 2,500 developers from 50 countries took part in the survey. Respondents were asked to indicate which frameworks they use in production (i.e., in apps released on the App Store or used in a corporate environment). The results proved to be very telling.

UIKit Remains King, but SwiftUI Is Breathing Down Its Neck

UIKit — 87% of respondents still use it in production. This is not surprising: a huge legacy codebase, the maturity of the framework, and support for all iOS versions make UIKit indispensable for complex interfaces.
SwiftUI — 64% of developers have already implemented it in production projects. However, only 22% use SwiftUI as their sole tool; the rest combine it with UIKit via representable wrappers.
AppKit — 31% for macOS. Interestingly, SwiftUI for desktop (macOS) still lags behind: only 18% use it in production on Mac.

Networking and Architectural Frameworks

In the area of networking and data architecture, the survey revealed a clear split:

URLSession — 93% (a basic tool that is not going away).
Alamofire — 58% (popularity is declining, but it is still used in large projects).
Combine — 41% (Apple's framework for reactive programming is actively displacing RxSwift, which is used by only 19%).
The Composable Architecture (TCA) — 27% (rapid growth: its share increased by 12% over the year).

Unexpected Favorites and Outsiders

Among specialized frameworks, it is worth noting Swift Charts (Apple) — 33% of developers already use it for data visualization in apps. Meanwhile, SwiftNIO (server-side Swift) remains a niche solution — only 6% of respondents use it in production, indicating that server-side Swift has still not become mainstream.

The survey also showed that Core Data (39%) is still holding on, but is losing ground to SwiftData (11%) and third-party solutions like Realm (7%) or GRDB (5%).

Conclusions for Developers

The main takeaway from the survey: the era of pure UIKit is ending, but a full transition to SwiftUI is still premature. The optimal strategy for production is a hybrid approach. Be sure to master Combine (it is becoming the de facto standard for reactive streams) and pay attention to TCA if you are working on a complex architecture. For macOS projects, it is still safer to stick with AppKit, but SwiftUI on the desktop is rapidly gaining momentum.

Stay tuned for updates on PythonLib — we will be publishing breakdowns of each framework with code examples.