Storyboard Navigation vs. Programmatic Navigation in Swift

Which should you use and why?

When your iOS app becomes a challenge, Xcode Storyboards doesn’t seem to be the right choice. When you’re implementing controllers and views, the Xcode Storyboard starts to feel slow to load and unclear, and results begin to look like a massive collection of puzzling arrows between connecting boxes. Thanks to the Cocoa framework and the UIKit framework, you can choose not to use the Storyboard and conceive a navigation pattern through coding, by pushing controllers and presenting modals exclusively coding in Swift (or Objective-C, if you’re a nostalgic programmer).

Who could read a complex storyboard anyway?

Limits and Cons of Xcode Storyboards

The Xcode storyboard is the natural evolution of the old Interface Builder, a deprecated app that developers used to create views, IBOutlets and IBActions (which keep the IB prefix even today). The old Interface Builder was an app itself, totally standalone, and has been discontinued since the release of Xcode 5. Then, new .storyboards files were introduced in Xcode and they were a breakthrough —a useful pattern to conceive navigation patterns in modern iOS app development.

Storyboards are a great tool as they give developers a good representation of how the app works in its entirety. More and more use auto-layout features that are able to transform a view in some kind of «responsive» views, ready to be adaptive on small and large displays of todays Apple devices. But after all..

I found Storyboards hard to be read and useful when you’re app keep growing and I’m stuck with slow loading times. Soon, you will absolutely lose control of your storyboard and it just become a mess.

Should I switch to Swift-driven navigation?

First: definitively yes if your app is made of dozens of controllers. I found Swift-driven navigation better when you have many connections between controllers. Sometimes code is even more readable than a storyboard to me. By using Storyboards, you can declare connection between controllers in a friendly and smart way, but we like Swift and opening modals or pushing controllers can be done in just one or two lines of code. Moreover, it’s a very common pattern to…