JetBrains AppCode is Dead!

JetBrains have announced the end of life of their Apple IDE AppCode. Designed as an alternative to the truly awful XCode IDE, AppCode was aimed at iOS and Mac developers.

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[rfsbsb]

That's really sad. I loved AppCode and dreaded Xcode. It will be missed. A note: Swift is actually open source and can run on other systems like linux.

[stesch-f]

TIL: There's a valid alternative to XCode. Well, there was.

[Landon_Hughes]

I guess I'm weird. I like working with Swift and XCode 😅

[clintonreisig]

I use CLion almost entirely for C / C++ development. What I like most about it is that CLion is powerful but not bloated. Git and CMake is built into it. JetBrains gets my recommendation for developers to get a look at the nice size collection of products.

[nick]

Yeah, Xcode is absolutely horrendous. I never thought I'd say this, but it somehow has an even more confusing and complex user interface than Visual Studio, which is impressive. It honestly makes Visual Studio look elegant and refined by comparison. I've only attempted Xcode development a few times, but the times that I did were absolutely maddening in all regards. It tries to be a Visual Studio copycat, but it is by no means 1:1.

[azerkahn]

I was forced in to iOS development earlier this year by my employer, and AppCode is the one thing that has kept me on the edge of sanity while developing for that dumpster fire of an ecosystem. This settles it. I must get a new job.

[PeterWitham]

I am also sad to read that AppCode is going away, I write Swift all the time (some Obj-C) and AppCode is delightful. I don’t have huge problems with Xcode but AppCode just worked nicely and fast, fast being the thing here I feel. There are other 3rd party projects working on IDE’s, so hopefully we will still have better options going forward.

[jarwarren]

Swift was heavily inspired by Rust and basically feels like Rust-lite. In fact, Graydon (creator of Rust) is now on the Swift team. And, like Rust, it's open source.

Unfortunately, alongside the AppCode announcement, CLion is also sunsetting their Swift plugin because it's based on AppCode.

[mandisaw]

8yrs as a pro in all three - enterprise mobile in both Android & iOS, and C#/Unity/Visual Studio for grad school & solo game-dev. XCode is a Mac-dev tool, for Mac-primary pro users. There're definitely areas where it should be better - debugging, accessibility & user-customization, refactoring & introspection - but it's geared towards people who already basically know what they need to do.

My exp is that tools geared towards established pros tend to lack polish & quality-of-life features, in favor of utilitarianism (c.f. 3dsMax, arguably Illustrator), while tools with a large junior/crossover userbase put more attention into their first-time-user-experience, and have more beginner-friendly UI (e.g. Unity, arguably Unreal).

I'm a Windows user by preference, so agree that there can definitely be a learning curve going to XCode. It would be great if Apple brought in a decent team to overhaul the app's guts, and put $$$ into some accessibility upgrades. But I think looking at any platform - or platform-native dev tool - outside the context of its own users and their expectations just doesn't work. It seems like AppCode was an escape-hatch for people bouncing off of XCode, which doesn't really work long-term (especially with Apple actively working to thwart 3rd party development).

[garethdavies]

I know once I swapped to flutter (which has a free "Jetbrains" IDE), you only have to touch xcode a little bit (part of the build chain). Haven't used C++ flat out in a long time, CLion is excellent, but it and Rider have an annoying feature matrix mismatch when working with Unreal (e.g. use X if debugging, Y if coding etc.).

If you're indie / paying for yourself. JB's all products package is extremely good value.

[ZZKJ]

Developing for Apple products has become such a total PITA, many developers have left that eco-system for good, me included.

[morothar_loki]

I'm guessing that maintaining AppCode is very expensive. Apple probably (actively) makes it really hard for programs that seek to make people less dependent on their own program (xcode). Hence JetBrains has a hard time covering their costs though subscriptions on this. Also, if you work long enough with xCode, everyone, even JetBrains, comes to the point where you just want to rage-quit the whole platform.

[markeissler]

Let's get the facts straight. Apple didn't "inherit" Obj-C, they bought it. They bought all of NeXT because at the time Apple's own efforts to build a new OS from the ground up (to get away from MacOS 9) were just not working out and the situation was getting desparate.

Obj-C is C with objects, sure, but it's design inspiration is SmallTalk and as such one of its key design patterns was not only the notion of passing messages around but also run-time resolution of recipients for those messages.

In syntax, Obj-C is far more expressive than Swift which is really just a cobbled together piece of junk based on a bunch of trendy ideas grabbed from other languages at the time...some of those ideas were never implemented completely and some of those ideas were never implemented correctly (e.g. "let" is a read-only variable, in JS ES6+ "let" is a writeable variable -- guess they couldn't just use "const" instead).

Xcode is an IDE that only seems to get worse with every iteration (like, how much worse can it get? just wait 'til the next WWDC).

[kabochaVA]

Indeed, XCode is the embodiment of Hell on Earth!

[Rhedox]

Apple made Swift because they needed a modern language that can integrate with the Objective-C runtime without any effort. It needs to be able to create Objective-C classes and subclasses. I don't think any other modern language can do that.

[vojtastruhar]

Xcode has uts quirks, but its not that bad imo. Because of its inherent first party support, I never even considered anything different.
No wonder AppCode is dead, it has to be insanely difficult to maintain such a thing.

[CapnSlipp]

Huh, strange opinions. I find Xcode to be easy to use, whereas every time I’ve tried to use AppCode I’ve found it to be a hellish mess of stuff that doesn’t work and Visual-Studio-derived opinionated UI and workflows that don’t really work well on macOS or for Obj-C/Swift development.

But that’s JetBrains’ whole thing, IMHO. It’s Visual Studio / Eclipse-like IDEs, but for for other platforms and languages. All the commonplace macOS shortcuts that are almost the same across all Mac apps— nope, you’re in Windows-land now. What about the text editing shortcuts that are a combination of what Mac OS has had since the early 90s + light emacs-style shortcuts? Also, nope, you’re using essentially a Windows-app-on-Mac now. Oh, what if you want the damn thing to stop forcing its own indent style (e.g. non-indented `case`) and just let you code the way Obj-C & Swift devs have been for decades? Nope, the IDE knows better than you, and good luck figuring out how to customize its autocorrect.

So I think you’re speaking to a small minority of people who are familiar with Windows/C# and Java development and are dabbling with using a Mac and maybe writing an app. For those of us who have always used Macs and have a coding history of using Codewarrior and BBEdit and TextMate and Project Builder and now Xcode, Xcode is heaven (except that the code introspection & refactoring could be fuller) and JetBrains apps are hell (save that the code inspection & refactoring is great).

Honestly, what I want is Resharper-for-Swift (Reswifter?). That’s it. Not an idea. Just a decent add-on tool from JetBrains doing what made the company famous and profitable in the first place— introspection/refactoring tools.

[domi_dreams]

And now, apple is drinking their mega pint of champagne :(

[disruptive_innovator]

As an outsider to Apple, their ecosystem always perplexes me. It sure doesn't seem inviting, for developers or third parties.

[tokero]

I realise that bashing XCode is very popular and while I am going to miss AppCode a lot especially for the refactoring capabilities, XCode is really not that bad anymore, you keep saying that it's hell but never once to you say why. Also Swift is open source and can be used for almost anything now a days it is in no way tied to the apple eco system...