Pierluigi Cifani has been doing iOS development for over a decade, starting back in 2013 with Objective-C. When he first saw a jailbroken iPhone running a terminal, he knew that’s what he wanted to do. He’s been writing iOS apps ever since, and in the last year, he’s been experimenting with Swift on Android — a topic he presented at NSSpain 2025.

Pierluigi started programming in college with Pascal, Java, and C. As soon as he had a chance to work on iOS at his company, he jumped on it. He remembers having headaches trying to understand how UITableView worked under the hood and how to write one. He’s loved iOS development ever since, from Objective-C’s pthreads to Grand Central Dispatch and now Swift.

At his company, they’ve adopted Swift on Android using the Skip toolchain, allowing them to share business logic between iOS and Android while keeping native UIs on both platforms. This approach lets them maintain native iOS apps while making iOS developers more economically viable by enabling code sharing without compromising the iOS experience.

In this episode, Pierluigi shares his journey into Swift on Android, discusses the advantages and challenges of this approach, compares it to Kotlin Multiplatform, and explains why he chose Swift over other cross-platform solutions.

Social

• X
• GitHub

Talks

• NSSpain 2025: Android Doesn’t Deserve Swift - But We Did It Anyway

Additional Links

• Skip
• Swift.org blog post: Announcing the Swift SDK for Android
• Getting Started with the Swift SDK for Android
• Swift Android Examples