TL;DR Skip is now completely free and open source. Become a sponsor ↗ to help sustain the future of truly native cross-platform development.
Since launching Skip in 2023, we’ve pursued one mission: enable developers to create premium mobile apps for iOS and Android from a single Swift and SwiftUI codebase — without any of the compromises that have encumbered cross-platform development tools since, well, forever.
Over the past three years, Skip has evolved significantly. We started with a Swift-to-Kotlin transpiler and Android support for the most common SwiftUI APIs. We then founded the Swift Android Workgroup ↗ and released the Swift Android SDK to compile Swift natively for Android. We now have dozens of popular integration frameworks, interoperate with thousands of cross-platform Swift packages, and feature the most complete independent SwiftUI implementation available.
Until today, Skip has required a paid subscription and license key to build apps. While free apps and indie developers below a revenue threshold were exempt, businesses were expected to subscribe. This model helped us bootstrap Skip without outside investment, but we’ve always known that to truly compete with legacy cross-platform tools and achieve widespread adoption, Skip would need to become freely available.
The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. First-party IDEs like Xcode and Android Studio, popular integration frameworks, and essential dev tools are all given away at no (direct) cost. The platform vendors monetize through developer program fees, app store commissions, and cloud services. Framework providers typically monetize through complementary services. But developer tools? Those have historically required the patronage of massive tech companies in order to fund their ongoing development, support, and infrastructure costs.
Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool. What if the company goes under? Gets acquired and shut down? What happens to their apps? We get it. While Skip’s innate ejectability offers some risk mitigation, product teams need absolute confidence that their chosen technologies will be around next week, next year, and beyond. They must remain immune from the dreaded “rug pull” that so often accompanies a “pivot”.
To keep the development community’s trust and achieve mass adoption, Skip needs a completely free and open foundation. Even if the core team disappeared, the community could continue supporting the technology and the apps that depend on it.
As of Skip 1.7, all licensing requirements have been removed. No license keys, no end-user license agreements, no trial or evaluation period.
Current Skip developers : Your setup remains completely unchanged, except you will no longer need your license key after upgrading.
: Your setup remains completely unchanged, except you will no longer need your license key after upgrading. New Skip users : You can start building immediately — no evaluation license required.
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