We didn't use swift in our app development for iOS devices. To use API v2 in iOS platform, we need an objective-C version!!! Please kindly provide an objective-C version!

@Steve, my team and I make the Workflow app and we disappointed in your decision to write the Dropbox v2 SDK in Swift. We are not able to adopt Swift yet because: - Including Swift code in an app causes the entire Swift runtime to be included in the app, which substantially increases the size of the app, the amount of time it takes for the user to download it, and the amount of space it takes on the user's phone. - Additionally, the Swift programming language is still rapidly evolving, and Swift code you write today may not compile tomorrow. This makes Swift a bad choice for large codebases like ours. - New versions of Swift are tied to new versions of Xcode and iOS. When iOS 10 enters beta, it will come alongside a new version of Swift that will not compile with the production, shipping version of Xcode (which you must use to submit apps to the App Store). Therefore we'd have to fork our codebase between the two versions of Swift. For the reasons I outlined above, we will not be able to adopt Swift until the language is more stable and the runtime is included in iOS. This means that even if you add Objective-C support to the framework, we will not be able to use it and will have to write our own version of the SDK from scratch. This has not been a problem with other SDKs, as it is standard practice for vendors to write their SDKs in Objective-C. Most major iOS apps (and indeed, the iOS frameworks and apps themselves) are still written in Objective-C and I believe you are making a sizable mistake by writing the new Dropbox SDK in Swift, let alone not including Objective-C compatibility. A lot of developers will be unable to use this SDK. The correct way of doing this would be to distribute an Objective-C SDK that works with both Objective-C and Swift apps, and perhaps an additional Swift wrapper if you want to provide a more Swift-native interface.

This decision is insane. Is there any technical justification you can give me that will allow me to convince my PM that our team now has to learn another programming language to use your API? Box, S3, GDrive, OneDrive and iCloud all have Objective-C apis available. Do you really feel that you'll be able to compete for IOS developer mindshare with just a Swift-based API? I strongly urge you to reconsider.

@Steve, thanks for providing the additional information and for your transparency. I'll just quickly reiterate that for us (and for many other iOS developers), including any Swift code in our app is not an option at this point in time. Your decision to not write the SDK itself in Objective-C on the grounds that "the experience of using an Objective-C library from Swift is not great" doesn't seem logical to me, because the converse (not being able to use Swift code in Objective-C) is a far more severe problem. Also keep in mind that all of Apple's iOS system frameworks are written in Objective-C, and Swift developers are more than capable of using them. Apple has made some great additions to Objective-C recently (nullability, generics) specifically to improve this type of interoperability. If I were in your shoes, I would invest your time into re-working the new SDK to be written solely in Objective-C, and perhaps distribute a nice Swift wrapper with fancy enums if that is something that developers are interested in. Maintaining 2 separate SDKs does not seem like a good choice. The majority of iOS apps today are written in Objective-C, not Swift. Your goal as an SDK vendor should be to ensure that your SDK is usable by the most number of developers, and potentially excluding more than half of your audience due to a programming language choice is a poor decision.

Agreed. Most iOS apps are still being written in Objective-C. We really need an Obj-C version of the API.

Another long time iOS developer here with a huge codebase and quite a few clients with running apps that require maintenance, and no plans to be switching to Swift anytime soon. It's all nice that we have these hipsters jumping on the Swift bandwagon as soon as it came along (it's from Apple so it should be the next great thing right?), but stability issues in Xcode at first and language changes along the road makes you think twice about switching all your Objective C code to Swift, unless you do this as a hobby and not write iOS apps for a living. There is a huge amount of code out there that is written in Objective C. Using Objective C from Swift is a lot easier than the inverse (which might be impossible in some cases as you have shown yourself), and there are a lot of apps out there (you will know better than me) that already integrate with Dropbox. You can't possibly expect all those developers to switch languages or include the Swift runtime + all the problems when trying to get the thing to compile if they want to maintain their app and integrate SDK V2? I think there has been a wrong decision at Dropbox: since you guys started a new SDK from scratch anyway it would make sense to just use the latest and "greatest" tech to write it in. I am currently writing an SDK myself for one of my clients, and doing it in Objective C for the reasons mentioned by my colleagues in the previous posts. Let's talk Android: would it make sense to build an Android SDK which would only work on Android 6.0 today? For me it is a similar story with iOS.

To use API v2 in iOS platform, we need an objective-C version

53 Replies

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Greg-DB
Dropbox Community Moderator
11 years ago
Thanks for the request! I'm sending it along.

For reference, I believe it's possible to use a Swift library in an Objective C app, though unfortunately I don't have any instructions for doing so available.
Paradigm M.
New member | Level 1
11 years ago
Agreed. Most iOS apps are still being written in Objective-C. We really need an Obj-C version of the API.
Mobile H.
New member | Level 1
11 years ago
Is there still no ObjectiveC sdk on github or I can't find it? Or at least an Objective-C project that is using the swift dropbox library.
Steve M.
Dropbox Staff
11 years ago
For API v2, we only have a Swift SDK and currently don't have plans to build an Objective-C SDK. As Greg mentioned, you should be able to just use the Swift SDK from your Objective-C code.

For API v1, the iOS SDK is written in Objective-C, and the code can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/developers-v1/core/sdks/ios.
Paradigm M.
New member | Level 1
11 years ago
This decision is insane.

Is there any technical justification you can give me that will allow me to convince my PM that our team now has to learn another programming language to use your API? Box, S3, GDrive, OneDrive and iCloud all have Objective-C apis available. Do you really feel that you'll be able to compete for IOS developer mindshare with just a Swift-based API?

I strongly urge you to reconsider.
Steve M.
Dropbox Staff
11 years ago
I'm a bit confused. Did you run into trouble just using the Swift SDK from your Objective-C project? Or is there some other reason you can't (or don't want to) do that?
Steve M.
Dropbox Staff
11 years ago
For those who haven't tried it yet, I just tried and believe that we'll need to expose the Swift classes to Objective-C explicitly by inheriting from NSObject and adding the @objc decorator. (I was able to make some progress just by making the Dropbox class "@objc public class Dropbox : NSObject", but I believe there is more work to do to expose the full functionality.)

We'll try to make sure it's easy to use the Swift SDK from Objective-C code before the Swift SDK is taken out of beta. Please let me know if you have other concerns about using the Swift SDK from your Objective-C projects.
Mobile H.
New member | Level 1
11 years ago
> We'll try to make sure it's easy to use the Swift SDK from Objective-C code before the Swift SDK is taken out of beta.

Nice, I hope you'll come up with something because my knowledge of swift is worse than my french and my french is rather poor.
Steve M.
Dropbox Staff
11 years ago
Back-pedaling here a bit, sorry. After further investigation yesterday, it looks to me like making it easy to call SwiftyDropbox from Objective-C is going to be considerably more work than I thought. I don't think Objective-C support will make it into the initial release of the SDK, but it is something we will look at after the initial release.

We'd welcome contributions from the community here if perhaps someone on this thread is more experienced with mixing Swift and Objective-C than we are. The biggest challenge identified so far is the use of enums.
Zhenya T.
New member | Level 1
11 years ago
I don't think that full support of Objective-C is reasonable here. Cause Swift provides more good development patterns based on its structs and enums that are not accessible from Objective-C. The best solution here from my point of view is If you want to use Swift SDKs from your Objective-C code than write the wrapper in Swift that will handle the paradigm difference as you like. May be it will push you to write projects in Swift. It's good since 2.0 version ;)