Artem Loenko, a veteran macOS/iOS developer, has published a 17 May 2026 blog post on justsitandgrin.im detailing why he abandoned a pure-SwiftUI chat feature and reverted to web technologies, estimating the wasted effort at roughly two full engineering days.
Loenko began building a Markdown-enabled chat interface in SwiftUI, but discovered the framework cannot natively select an entire Markdown document constructed from its primitives. He pivoted to AppKit’s NSTextView with TextKit 2, yet lost prior performance and testing gains because SwiftUI integration proved brittle. Streaming LLM responses triggered CPU spikes, prompting a second rewrite using NSCollectionView. After another day of work, he found collection-view cells blink “by design,” forcing him to shelve the native stack entirely.
The episode lands amid intensifying debate over Electron alternatives. Loenko’s experience parallels recent complaints from 1Password and Slack, which told The Verge in March 2026 that Apple’s native text APIs still lag behind Chromium’s in handling real-time collaborative editing. Venture funding reflects the tension: Tauri raised $8 million in April 2026 to polish its Rust-based web-view wrapper, while Swift-native startup Warp secured $50 million in January 2026 touting GPU-accelerated terminal rendering. Apple’s own SDK release notes for Xcode 15.4, reviewed by 9to5mac.com, list only “minor fixes” for TextKit 2, signaling limited near-term relief.
Loenko says he will ship the chat feature inside a lightweight web view “within the week,” and plans to open-source his bridging code once the product update clears App Store review. Observers should watch Apple’s WWDC 2026 session list, due 3 June, for any TextKit or SwiftUI enhancements that could reverse such defections.