What are SwiftUI's current limitations?

(As of mid-2026, post-WWDC26.)

What WWDC26 specifically improved

New toolbar APIs (visibilityPriority, toolbarOverflowMenu, topBarPinnedTrailing, toolbarMinimizeBehavior); TextEditor rich text support; backgroundProminence environment value for selection-state styling; a new Document API and performance improvements to build times and data flow.

What’s still genuinely limiting today

1. Focus/keyboard timing on sheet presentation — SwiftUI can’t autofocus a text field in an appearing sheet in the same animation the way UIKit-backed system sheets do.

2. Rich text and document editing remains behind AppKit/UIKit’s native equivalents — file exporter/PDF export quirks persist.

3. Custom gesture composition, especially with Canvas/TimelineView-driven content — real-world gesture limitations reported combining DragGesture with Canvas/TimelineView.

4. Platform-specific gaps still requiring UIKit/AppKit fallback — some SiriKit Intents integrations, MenuBarExtra customization — narrowing every release.

5. Backward compatibility burden — new APIs are always OS-version-gated.

6. Layout system flexibility, while much improved, still has edges — very exotic custom layouts still sometimes more natural in UIKit.

7. Performance in extreme-scale lists/complex view hierarchies — narrowed a lot, but still a gap in extreme cases.

The honest framing for an interview

“SwiftUI’s rough edges have narrowed a lot even in the last year. What’s still genuinely limiting: some system-level polish gaps like sheet-presentation keyboard-focus timing, edge cases in custom gesture handling combined with Canvas/TimelineView rendering, and the structural tax of new APIs always shipping OS-version-gated. My default is still SwiftUI-first, dropping into UIViewRepresentable/UIHostingController for the specific gaps rather than avoiding SwiftUI wholesale.”