The Swift Observation Framework Is Great but Not My Cup of Tea

How a new Framework is actually a downgrade

Every couple of years, a new thing hits the SwiftUI ecosystem. This time, it is Observation. But it is not the update I was hoping for.

Observing with glasses: Pexels Andrea Piacquadio

What Is the Observation Framework?

Observation is a new framework that wants to streamline state updates for our views. While we already had State and ObservedObject/StateObject , those weren’t perfect either.

Using iOS17 — at least Apple thinks so — all we need is Environment , Bindable and State . Gone are all the other confusing ways of doing the same thing — managing state.

The new framework brings a couple of improvements. The most important ones:

• Only properties that are actually observed trigger view updates
• Simpler syntax, simplified state management
• Macro-based code generation
• Swift framework, not part of SwiftUI, cross-platform

Especially the performance parts and the cumbersome syntax were a major issue of the old ways of handling state.

How Does It Differ From Old State Management?