March 22nd, 2023

Say goodbye to Objective-C, and hello to Swift success

As of this month, we are announcing that we will be retiring our Objective-C SDK in favor of focusing solely on our Swift SDK for Apple platforms going forward. Here's what you can expect.

Ryan Ratner

Ryan Ratner

Product Marketing Manager

Konstantin Bender

Konstantin Bender

Senior Software Engineer

As of this month, we will be retiring our Objective-C SDK in favor of focusing solely on our Swift SDK for Apple platforms going forward. This change will allow us to direct a greater portion of our engineering resources toward our Swift SDK to better position ourselves and our customers for future success in the Apple Ecosystem.

Why?

When Swift was unveiled, it was built as the natural successor and ultimate replacement for ObjC. Since that introduction in 2014, Objective-C (ObjC) has mainly been used as a support language to maintain and update legacy applications for iOS and MacOS. Nearly 10 years later, Apple continues to invest heavily in Swift through continued updates, frameworks, and features that encourage developers to utilize Swift for new app development. The adoption of these new features into our Swift SDK requires significant investment from our team, and it's for this reason that we at Ditto felt that it was the right time to reallocate our ObjC resources into Swift. With a higher rate of productivity, increased efficiencies across the board, and overall better performance, Swift is the future of the Apple Ecosystem and the best way for our team to ensure our customers are provided with a seamless Apple integration across their platforms such as iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and more.

How do Ditto customers benefit?

Like Ditto, our customers are major adopters of Swift and have already followed the industry in its move away from ObjC. As Ditto leaves ObjC behind, our customers will benefit from a much more focused team. We'll be able to provide better integration of top features such as Async/Await, Combine, and SwiftUI resulting in a more productive and user-friendly Swift SDK.

How does this affect my Ditto applications?

As stated above, the ObjC SDK has been deprecated. The vast majority of our customers don't need to do anything, since most of them are already using our Swift SDK. If you are a Ditto customer, keep using the Swift SDK! As we escalate support and investment from our engineering team, sit back and enjoy a higher-quality, seamless integration with the Swift ecosystem.

If you are currently developing with ObjC, using Ditto is still possible with the inclusion of ObjC wrappers around the native Swift data structures. See the Code Sample on GitHub for more information and please reach out to our team if you need help with your ObjC project.

We are committed to making this transition as simple as possible for our customers. For more feature updates, be sure to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Linkedin.


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