The Pros and Cons of RxSwift…

I recently wrapped up a major app project for Google’s Cloud Next ’18 conference. We made extensive use of RxSwift throughout the project, centered around a couple of key objectives:

  1. Model-layer parity with Android – Design nearly-identical APIs for the view model and persistence layers on iOS and Android to help avoid the “iOS does one thing, but Android does another” class of bugs. Internally the implementations are quite different, but having their public interfaces documented in a Wiki allowed each platform to feel out the requirements for a particular object, then document it for the other team. This saved massive amounts of time over the course of the project and resulted in very few platform discrepancy bugs.

  2. React to schedule changes in real time – Google Cloud Next is a BIG conference; second only to Google I/O in terms of attendance. With limited seating at the various sessions, it is very important that attendees know exactly which sessions have available seats as well as receiving important updates about their reserved sessions ASAP. To accomplish this, we used RxSwift to transform observations of the real-time session details coming out of our Firebase Cloud Firestore back end into data streams that could be easily bound to views in the user’s schedule.

This was my first production experience with Rx and, as such, I experienced a considerable ramp-up curve over the course of the first month. If you are working on your first Rx project, expect to lose about 50% of your productivity for the first month and 20% of it the second month as you come to grips with the different style of data flow that Rx enables as well as learning which tool in the Rx toolbox is appropriate for each different data scenario. The up-side is that techniques learned for Rx on one platform are broadly applicable to others (which was a big reason why we chose to work with it on this project).

Once I became more familiar with Rx, I started being able to model data transformations in my head and implement them with a bare minimum of fuss. This was gratifying, but it always felt like there were some sharp edges around the boundaries between Rx code and more traditional UIKit code governing things like user interaction. I’ve created a quick list of the major points to be aware of when considering RxSwift for your iOS project:

Pros:

  • Able to describe a common interface for model layer APIs between iOS and Android. This was the biggest win for us on this project, saving many dozens of hours of QA bug fixing time.
  • Avoid nested-closure hell that typifies complex asynchronous data transformations in Foundation/UIKit.

Cons:

  • Steep learning curve makes ramping new developers onto the project difficult (and toward the end of the project, completely impractical). This is the #1 reason you should consider avoiding RxSwift: when it’s crunch time, you won’t be able to add developers to the project unless they’re already Rx veterans.
  • Debugging Rx data transformations is horrible. When Rx is working as intended, it’s borderline magical. When it has a problem, the debugging process is considerably more difficult. Any breakpoint you hit within a data stream will present a 40+ entry backtrace stack with dozens of inscrutable internal Rx methods separating and obscuring the code you actually wrote.
  • Rx metastasizes throughout your code base. The entry and exit-points where Rx interacts with UIKit are awkward and difficult to parse. We often found ourselves saying “oh, well if this service’s method returned an Observable instead of a variable, we could do this particular transformation more easily…” and so Rx spreads to another class in your app.

In the end, we can’t say we dramatically cut development time by using RxSwift, it simply replaced one class of problems (maintaining cross-platform consistency) with another (figuring out how to best use RxSwift). We will be launching into the next phase of the project soon, updating the app for Google Cloud Next ’19. I’m sure I will have more to talk about once that effort has completed next year.