Skip, Day, and Rust: Why I'd Still Choose Swift and Kotlin

Marc Prud’hommeaux left the Swift Android workgroup to work on Rust. He helped create Skip, which lets you write Swift and SwiftUI for iOS and Android. His new project, Day, uses Rust to share app logic and UI across mobile and desktop platforms. His argument is largely about portability and getting beyond Apple’s tools. AI makes a language’s friendliness to human programmers less important to him. I agree with that part. But for mobile apps, it takes me somewhere else: I’d rather write Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. We can go lower. Should we? If the reason to use Rust is a performance gain that matters to the app, I’m all for it. Agents make low-level code more approachable. They can help write assembly too, if we really want to go there. I’m not volunteering to write a settings screen in assembly. There are still trade-offs. Rust doesn’t automatically make an app faster than Swift or Kotlin; the workload and implementation matter. Going lower also leaves us with code to…

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