I don't actually disagree with much in this video apart from the conclusion that Swift is to blame for Apple dev community's shift in focus: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1317872055711191040

I do think that there was a shift in the Apple dev community away from thinking about cool apps and user experiences around about the same time that Swift was introduced, but correlation does not imply causation, and I have another theory about the cause:

Swift was announced in 2014, the same year as iOS 8. It was met by much enthusiasm and embraced by a lot of the community, who shifted away from talking about animations and apps to talking about Swift. But if app dev was so much more interesting, why did that happen?

It's also true that a lot of time around then was spent rewriting all of our apps and not moving forward, but was that down to Swift? I think not.

In 2014 everybody was already working on massive rewrites, not because of Swift, but because of *flat design*

The new design language introduced in 2013 with iOS 7 was a momentous (and imho utterly disastrous) event that completely shifted the focus of app designers and developers from moving forward with new apps to trying to figure out how to rework existing apps to fit in.

In 2014, everyone was still trying to find their way with flat design, including Apple itself. There were several successive years of messing with font weights, gradients, drop shadows, blur, etc trying to find coherent style that worked for everything. Arguably we still haven't.

Apple instantly making every existing app look obsolete was *way* more disruptive than the introduction of a new language, especially one with such good backwards-compatibility.

And, even more so than Swift, it utterly divided the community over whether it was a good thing.

I absolutely *hated* flat design. In my view it took the most beautiful, intuitive software platform in existence and made it ugly and unapproachable.

So for me, Swift wasn't a distraction from thinking about UX and UI, it was a refuge from thinking about flat design.

These days I prefer to work with data structures and low-level algorithms rather than UI, but that's down to flat design, not Swift.

Swift is probably the only thing that kept me interested in the Apple ecosystem after flat design killed my interest in app development.