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2 posts with the tag “roadmap”

Skip 2025 Retrospective and 2026 Roadmap

As 2025 comes to a close, we’ve been reflecting on how far Skip has advanced this year. What began nearly three years ago with a simple desire to enable cross-platform app development with Swift and SwiftUI has grown into a thriving ecosystem, a strong community of developers and contributors, and a platform powering real production apps across iOS and Android.

This year wasn’t just about growth in numbers. It was about expanding depth and breadth: deeper integrations, stronger foundations, and a clearer vision for the future of native Swift across the dominant mobile platforms.

Native Swift on Android Becomes Officially Supported

Section titled “Native Swift on Android Becomes Officially Supported”

The highlight of 2025 by far was the official release of the Swift SDK for Android on swift.org, along with Skip’s support in the form of Skip Fuse. Prior to the advent of Skip Fuse, Skip operated solely in transpiled mode (now called “Skip Lite”), which converts Swift source code to Kotlin. Skip Fuse, on the other hand, builds natively-compiled Swift targeting the Android platform, which both eliminates the limitations imposed by source transpilation, as well as unlocks the universe of thousands of native Swift packages that are compatible with the Android platform.

Interest in the Swift SDK for Android has exploded since the initial announcement and follow-up blog posts on swift.org. We at Skip are proud to be founding members of the Swift Android workgroup, and we are committed to the platform’s enduring stability and support. And where the scope of the workgroup ends, we complete the picture by providing the tooling, libraries, and support needed to build universal apps from a single Swift codebase.

Liquid Glass and the Wisdom of Staying Native

Section titled “Liquid Glass and the Wisdom of Staying Native”

The launch of iOS 26 and the emergence of Liquid Glass as the new interface style was a pivotal moment for the cross-platform app development technosphere, as well as a powerful validation of Skip’s core philosophy. From day one, Skip has avoided intermediating or re-implementing SwiftUI on iOS or other Apple platforms. By staying fully native, Skip was able to support Liquid Glass on Day 1, automatically benefiting every Skip-based app without rewrites or workarounds (see our blog post on the topic).

In contrast, other cross-platform toolkits — such as Flutter and Compose Multiplatform — have found themselves stranded, incapable of adopting Liquid Glass and stuck on the previous UI generation with their mimicked faux-native components. For iOS users, that means outdated interfaces and an exacerbation of an already uncanny-valley non-native experience. For developers, it means frustration, limitation, and an inability to achieve the highest-quality app experience that their businesses demand.

Skip’s belief is that by embracing native platforms wholly — not abstracting them away — is the best path forward, both for users and developers. SkipUI maps un-intermediated SwiftUI on iOS to native Jetpack Compose on Android, guaranteeing that the user experience is always performant and familiar to users of the respective platforms.

A stock Skip app has just a few core dependencies: SkipUI, which provides a bridge from the SwiftUI API to a native Compose UI on Android, along with SkipFoundation, SkipModel, and SkipLib. But Skip also facilitates a thriving ecosystem of optional libraries, providing features and integrations that unlock the vast capabilities of third-party libraries and services and provide a unified dual-platform API surface.

Throughout 2025, Skip’s library ecosystem has matured and expanded dramatically. The community and core team introduced a wide range of new dual-platform frameworks designed to solve real-world problems without compromise. Some of our most popular integrations, like SQLite, Bluetooth, Firebase, Supabase, and WebView, have improved greatly through the help of outside contributions. These APIs were refined, edge cases were resolved, documentation improved, and real production feedback shaped work on of these frameworks.

In addition, we have some newer entrants to the Skip ecosystem, including:

  • SkipNFC and SkipDevice for unlocking low-level hardware capabilities
  • SkipStripe for Stripe for payments and subscriptions
  • SkipPostHog for analytics and product insights
  • SkipAuth0 for authentication and identity
  • SkipSocketIO for real-time communication through the Socket.IO libraries

These integration frameworks aren’t always just simple wrappers; they are designed to feel idiomatic in Swift, be composable with SwiftUI, and act faithfully with each platform’s underlying capabilities. And all of these platforms work equally with with transpiled Skip Lite as well as compiled Skip Fuse. A partial list of these Skip modules can be found at the Skip Module Index.

As exciting as 2025 was, we’re even more energized by what’s ahead. Our roadmap for 2026 includes:

  • A growing catalog of integration frameworks for popular libraries, services, and backend platforms
  • Continued expansion and refinement of SkipFuse and Swift-on-Android tooling
  • Performance improvements, better diagnostics, and enhanced developer ergonomics
  • Enhanced IDE integration, both with our existing Xcode support as well as emerging alternatives for iOS development
  • A new series of deep-dive blog posts exploring real-world Skip architectures, advanced SwiftUI patterns, and platform-specific best practices

Most importantly, we’ll continue building Skip in close collaboration with the community that made this year possible. If you haven’t yet tried Skip, there’s no better time than now to sign up for your free evaluation and start creating universal mobile apps that are free from compromises.

As always, Happy Skipping, and Happy New Year!

Skip 2024 Roadmap

Skip enables you to build the best possible apps, for the widest possible audience, using a single codebase. Our goal with Skip is to enable individuals and small teams to create apps for both the iPhone and Android using the native first-party toolkits for those platforms: SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose. We believe this is the best possible experience for users of iPhone and Android devices.

We spent 2023 building the underlying technology to enable this project. The SkipStone transpiler takes your code written in Swift for iOS and converts it into Kotlin for Android. The open-source SkipStack frameworks provide runtime support: they transparently bridge the various Darwin and iOS software layers into their Android equivalents. This includes SkipUI, which takes your SwiftUI interface and turns it into the equivalent Jetpack Compose code, as well as SkipFoundation, which bridges the low-level Foundation framework to the Java APIs used by Android apps. Bringing it all together is the Skip Xcode plugin that automatically runs the transpiler when you build your project and converts your entire Swift package into a buildable Android gradle project.

The end result is a magical development experience: you develop in Xcode and run your SwiftUI app in the iOS Simulator, and Skip seamlessly transpiles and launches your Compose app in the Android emulator. Change some code and re-run, and within seconds both your iOS app and Android app are rebuilt and run side-by-side, ready for testing. The Skip Tour video provides a taste of this process.

In 2024 we will be expanding our ecosystems of Skip frameworks beyond SwiftUI and Foundation. Aside from user interface widgets and operating system integration, a modern mobile app needs a variety of capabilities: graphics and animation, SQL databases, push notifications, media players, cloud storage, payment integrations, parsers for common data formats, cryptography, game technologies, et cetera.

There are many existing libraries, both 1st and 3rd party, for both Android and iOS that fulfill these needs. Our goal is not to re-invent them, but rather to build common abstractions atop them. For example, the new SkipAV framework for playing music and videos is not created from scratch, but is rather implemented on top of iOS’s AVKit and Android’s ExoPlayer. This enables Skip apps to take advantage of each platform’s best-in-class libraries that have matured over the years, while at the same time maintaining a single dual-platform API for developer convenience.

These frameworks are all free and open-source software that Android and iOS app developers can use in their apps. We sell the Skip transpiler itself, but the ecosystem of Skip frameworks can be used – independently of the Skip transpiler – whether or not you are a customer. We choose to make them free software not merely as a value-add for our own customers, but also to grant you, the developer, the confidence that anything you build with Skip will remain under your purview, and that you retain the agency to continue to iterate on your app, with or without the Skip transpiler.

The realization of genuinely native apps for both major mobile platforms, created from a single codebase in a single language, has been a dream for a long time. 2024 will be an exciting year.