{"slug": "skip", "name": "Skip", "category": "dev-libs", "category_name": "Libraries and frameworks", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 11, "warners": 1, "score": 3.285, "rising": 0.02, "first": "2025-11-06", "latest": "2026-09-15", "why": "You don't 100% need them to release it, there's projects like Skip:", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 4, "compare": 3, "warn": 1}, "spark": [2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "You don't 100% need them to release it, there's projects like Skip:", "kind": "", "icon": false, "domain": "skip.tools", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://skip.tools/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Skip", "skip"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 795446912, "item_id": 49715432, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715432", "by": "giancarlostoro", "date": "2026-09-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You don't 100% need them to release it, there's projects like Skip:", "excerpt": "You don't 100% need them to release it, there's projects like Skip: https://skip.dev/ Which was open sourced sometime back, and builds iOS and Android apps, which is really neat, because it means your Android app's logic etc is all natively compiled, only a shim of Java to run it. I wish Google would let people publish standard compiled binaries for their OS instead of just making everything rely on the ART. Honestly", "context": "", "use_case": "cross-platform app builds", "switched_from": "", "story": "Swift 6.4 Released"}, {"id": 749487184, "item_id": 46842949, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46842949", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2026-01-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Skip allows to \"Build truly native iPhone and Android apps with Skip\"", "excerpt": "> What company is using Swift outside of Apple-specific development? Skip allows to \"Build truly native iPhone and Android apps with Skip\" so technically skip runs swift on android which is outside of Apple-specific development. They also recently got open source from their closed source model prior from what I can tell https://skip.dev/", "context": "", "use_case": "native iOS and Android apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)"}, {"id": 737582192, "item_id": 46098887, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46098887", "by": "greentea23", "date": "2025-11-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "seems like Swift is going in the right direction here", "excerpt": "When I was in school, the corporate shill language was MATLAB, and even today not every program has moved on to greener pastures (Python/numpy, Julia). But doesn't Swiftui support Android now? https://github.com/skiptools/skip, I'm extremely skeptical and critical of anything Apple does, and I don't like programming languages without critical mass of community and corporate contributers, but seems like Swift is going", "context": "", "use_case": "Swift apps on Android", "switched_from": "", "story": "Paul Hegarty's updated CS193p SwiftUI course released by Stanford"}, {"id": 733494256, "item_id": 45843391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45843391", "by": "wahnfrieden", "date": "2025-11-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "https://skip.tools has bridged it to Compose.", "excerpt": "Yes historically but not by design. It's more of a transition tactic. Starting with iOS 26, new UIKit and AppKit features are implemented by \"native\" SwiftUI (specifically, Liquid Glass's implementation). In recent years they have also been replacing UIKit/AppKit-backed SwiftUI views with \"native\" SwiftUI implementations. But besides this technical change I don't think Apple has any desire to bring SwiftUI to other p", "context": "", "use_case": "SwiftUI to Android bridge", "switched_from": "", "story": "Swift on FreeBSD Preview"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 747331936, "item_id": 46708246, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708246", "by": "gouthamve", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory.", "excerpt": "https://github.com/skiptools/skip This is cool, but there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory. This has a license: https://github.com/skiptools/skipstone but it vendors the other repo according to the readme? I am super confused about how this would work.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}]}], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["cross-platform app builds", "native ios and android apps", "cross-platform app toolkit", "cross-platform apps", "cross-platform ios and android apps", "cross-platform app framework"], "compared": [{"slug": "flutter", "name": "Flutter", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 747373920, "item_id": 46710870, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710870", "by": "marcprux", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Flutter's grim outlook has resulted in a surge of interest in Skip", "excerpt": "See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well. > near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are alread", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 747368304, "item_id": 46710519, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710519", "by": "marcprux", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Skip is native on both platforms.", "excerpt": "Good question. I'll try to answer as objectively as possible, despite my bias towards Skip's approach. Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) enables you to target different platforms with your Kotlin. In the context of mobile apps, it allows you to compile your Kotlin to a native framework for iOS, so you can reuse your business logic. On iOS, the Kotlin is running in its own little garbage-collected runtime, but it sets up a b", "context": "founding member of Swift Android workgroup", "use_case": "cross-platform SwiftUI apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 747359888, "item_id": 46709993, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709993", "by": "marcprux", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Skip uses the native toolkits and conventions on both platforms", "excerpt": "Yes, as I just responded there, Skip uses the native toolkits and conventions on both platforms: SwiftUI on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android. So you automatically get the platforms' built-in accessibility support. You can see a sample snippet at https://skip.dev/docs/components/accessibility/", "context": "", "use_case": "Cross-platform apps with native UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 732532688, "item_id": 45783293, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45783293", "by": "gregabbott", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Plain text, markup and Markdown to HTML with XSLT:", "excerpt": "Plain text, markup and Markdown to HTML with XSLT: REPO: https://github.com/gregabbott/skip DEMO: https://gregabbott.pages.dev/skip (^ View Source: 2 lines of XML around a .md file)", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706906", "title": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source", "mentions": 9}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49714239", "title": "Swift 6.4 Released", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46841374", "title": "Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483023", "title": "Swift on Android: Full Native App Development Now Possible", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415819", "title": "Show HN: My app just won best iOS Japanese learning tool of 2025 award", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46051422", "title": "Paul Hegarty's updated CS193p SwiftUI course released by Stanford", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 2}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {"compare": 3, "warn": 1, "neutral": 3, "recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 795446912, "item_id": 49715432, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715432", "by": "giancarlostoro", "date": "2026-09-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You don't 100% need them to release it, there's projects like Skip:", "excerpt": "You don't 100% need them to release it, there's projects like Skip: https://skip.dev/ Which was open sourced sometime back, and builds iOS and Android apps, which is really neat, because it means your Android app's logic etc is all natively compiled, only a shim of Java to run it. I wish Google would let people publish standard compiled binaries for their OS instead of just making everything rely on the ART. Honestly", "context": "", "use_case": "cross-platform app builds", "switched_from": "", "story": "Swift 6.4 Released"}, {"id": 749487184, "item_id": 46842949, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46842949", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2026-01-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Skip allows to \"Build truly native iPhone and Android apps with Skip\"", "excerpt": "> What company is using Swift outside of Apple-specific development? Skip allows to \"Build truly native iPhone and Android apps with Skip\" so technically skip runs swift on android which is outside of Apple-specific development. They also recently got open source from their closed source model prior from what I can tell https://skip.dev/", "context": "", "use_case": "native iOS and Android apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)"}, {"id": 747446576, "item_id": 46715411, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46715411", "by": "mdasen", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Skip was ejectable.", "excerpt": "It's not simply that developers expect to get their tools for free. So many developers have seen the rug-pulls and exploitation of non-free tools. Build on Oracle and your company will need to hire more lawyers than developers. Even in less-exploitive situations, we've seen a lot of situations where things become many times more expensive. Google AppEngine moved from charging based on usage to charging based on insta", "context": "", "use_case": "Cross-platform app toolkit", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 747367153, "item_id": 46710447, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710447", "by": "agentifysh", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps.", "excerpt": "This is a welcome addition but why should Flutter devs use this ? Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications. I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.", "context": "Flutter developer", "use_case": "cross-platform apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 747361857, "item_id": 46710116, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710116", "by": "bbx", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "maybe Skip would allow me to do it anyways", "excerpt": "Interesting. I used Expo recently and loved the development experience. I also built a simple iPhone app with Swift, and it was a decent experience. I have plans of building another iPhone app and was considering Swift again, which would make me miss building an Android app, but maybe Skip would allow me to do it anyways.", "context": "", "use_case": "cross-platform iOS and Android apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 747356849, "item_id": 46709803, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709803", "by": "RobMurray", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Skip looks ideal; I was planning on asking you about licensing", "excerpt": "This is great news, thank you. I have been looking into a way to port Soundscape Community [1], a navigation app for the blind to Android without having two codebases to maintain. Skip looks ideal; I was planning on asking you about licensing for a very small team with almost no funding. Someone else already asked about talkback accessibility; I assume it will work because it translates to native UI controls on andro", "context": "", "use_case": "Cross-platform app framework", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 747345616, "item_id": 46709101, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709101", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "LGPL3 has now been added: https://github.com/skiptools/skip/commit/7ad94680a801ca393fe9715565766ccb0629cdfa", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 747331936, "item_id": 46708246, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708246", "by": "gouthamve", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory.", "excerpt": "https://github.com/skiptools/skip This is cool, but there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory. This has a license: https://github.com/skiptools/skipstone but it vendors the other repo according to the readme? I am super confused about how this would work.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Skip Is Now Free and Open Source"}, {"id": 743755680, "item_id": 46484730, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484730", "by": "aprilnya", "date": "2026-01-03", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I wonder how this compares to Skip[1]?", "excerpt": "I wonder how this compares to Skip[1]? This seems to be focused entirely on Android, as opposed not making existing iOS SwiftUI code work on Android. I assume that might lead to better apps but any practical examples? [1] https://skip.tools/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Swift on Android: Full Native App Development Now Possible"}, {"id": 742737232, "item_id": 46421077, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46421077", "by": "wahnfrieden", "date": "2025-12-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "It was already fully native Swift and I began the apps before React Native existed. But it\u2019s not true what you say! I have begun prototyping experiments in running my Swift and SQLite in the browser via WASM, and I\u2019m also evaluating https://skip.tools for running SwiftUI on Android. I will go cross platform without ditching Swift. But to be honest I am more likely to pursue web than native Android (Skip runs Swift na", "context": "", "use_case": "SwiftUI on Android", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: My app just won best iOS Japanese learning tool of 2025 award"}, {"id": 737582192, "item_id": 46098887, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46098887", "by": "greentea23", "date": "2025-11-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "seems like Swift is going in the right direction here", "excerpt": "When I was in school, the corporate shill language was MATLAB, and even today not every program has moved on to greener pastures (Python/numpy, Julia). But doesn't Swiftui support Android now? https://github.com/skiptools/skip, I'm extremely skeptical and critical of anything Apple does, and I don't like programming languages without critical mass of community and corporate contributers, but seems like Swift is going", "context": "", "use_case": "Swift apps on Android", "switched_from": "", "story": "Paul Hegarty's updated CS193p SwiftUI course released by Stanford"}, {"id": 733979169, "item_id": 45873698, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873698", "by": "wahnfrieden", "date": "2025-11-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I'm also evaluating https://skip.tools for running my SwiftUI on Android.", "excerpt": "It's native SwiftUI and Swift so I want to avoid a rewrite. I am experimenting with porting my Swift code to web via WASM, now that SQLite WASM backed by IndexedDB is usable so I can reuse the data layer too. I'm also evaluating https://skip.tools for running my SwiftUI on Android.", "context": "", "use_case": "run SwiftUI on Android", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"}, {"id": 733494256, "item_id": 45843391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45843391", "by": "wahnfrieden", "date": "2025-11-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "https://skip.tools has bridged it to Compose.", "excerpt": "Yes historically but not by design. It's more of a transition tactic. Starting with iOS 26, new UIKit and AppKit features are implemented by \"native\" SwiftUI (specifically, Liquid Glass's implementation). In recent years they have also been replacing UIKit/AppKit-backed SwiftUI views with \"native\" SwiftUI implementations. But besides this technical change I don't think Apple has any desire to bring SwiftUI to other p", "context": "", "use_case": "SwiftUI to Android bridge", "switched_from": "", "story": "Swift on FreeBSD Preview"}]}