Replacing Redux in Swift with… something better?

Just as I was getting close to recording a video on Mail Pilot Discovery Edition’s new keyboard shortcuts, I noticed something horrifying.

They were a little… sluggish.

The Problem

When you’re scrolling around the Mail Pilot Discovery Edition interface, with all of its rendered email previews, the interface is buttery smooth despite how much is being rendered. I worked hard to make it extremely performant (redeveloping the entire interface twice to get it there). It is a super unique interface, and required stepping beyond convention to get it to work really well.

Once the keyboard shortcuts were working, moving messages felt fine. But… using your arrow keys to flip up and down between messages did not. You expect this particular interaction to be instantaneous — even more so than basically any other action, as it doesn’t feel as “heavy” of an action as, say, setting a reminder on a message and having it move out of the inbox.

Ultimately, I immediately knew the answer to the inevitable “but, why?”

I had finally hit the limit.

Way back in 2017, when I started developing this new generation of Mail Pilot, I knew I needed a better engineering paradigm for the entire app; convention over invention means…