I’ve primarily been an iOS developer for the past 5 years and I still enjoy it. Swift has a lot of niceties such as Optionals, and Enums with associated values. SwiftUI simplifies UI development and provides a faster feedback loop with previews which is very important for me because I’m easily distracted. It’s also easy to drop back to UIKit if needed.
You probably don’t want to target lower than iOS 16 if using SwiftUI since a lot of nice APIs aren’t available on lower versions.
We used Catalyst in work for bringing our iOS app to macOS and it’s been good enough.
It may be Stockholm syndrome but I quite like Xcode. My main complaints are that the vim bindings are seriously lacking, and that it’s slow to start debugging when hitting a breakpoint.
If you have an iPhone, you can lower the brightness even further by going to Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut and enabling “Reduce white point”. Then you can triple press the power button to toggle it.
But I agree with your overall point. It shouldn’t be hidden under accessibility, and more devices should have lower brightness settings.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels