SwiftUI Preview doesn't work with UIKit legacy projects

6/10 Medium

The Preview feature in SwiftUI requires building the entire project and fails with compatibility errors when UIKit is present in the codebase. This prevents developers from using Previews to speed up development in mixed UIKit/SwiftUI projects.

SwiftUIUIKitXcode
Category
compatibility
Workaround
none
Stage
debug
Freshness
persistent
Scope
framework
Upstream
open
Recurring
Yes
Buyer Type
team
Maintainer
slow

Sources

Collection History

Query: “What are the most common pain points with Swift for developers in 2025?”4/4/2026

The preview feature won't work on a project that has UIKit implemented. This is because it will need to build the whole project to create the preview, and even then it will sometimes give you errors related to pods.

Created: 4/4/2026Updated: 4/4/2026