Apple decided to deprecate Objective-C and AppKit. The Web is far more stable than native UX widgets, breaks less often nowadays and has a larger pool of developers so its Electron all the way for everyone.
And deprecating is not the same thing as breaking or removing. It does signal the preparation to remove. However, Objective-C (last I checked) still works very well.
Furthermore... how would one even remove Objective-C? It's the glue that holds everything together in macOS[0]; removing it would be like removing COM from Windows. Apple would need to rewrite all of their public frameworks in Swift and remove the Objective-C bridges... and, at that point, why stop at just removing Objective-C? Why not kill AppKit while we're at it and make UIKit the only way to present a window[1] to the display? At that point, nobody is going to bother rewriting their apps[2], and the Mac loses all it's developer support.
[0] And, for that matter, most of their other operating systems.
[1] WindowScene, technically
[2] Astute fans of macOS history might remember this sounding quite familiar. When Steve Jobs bought Apple with Apple's money, he wanted to basically continue NeXT as it was (even the Windows NT port) and replace System 7 entirely with lightly-rebranded OPENSTEP 5 and a VM (dubbed the "penalty box"). This failed so dramatically the whole project was cancelled/rebranded as "OSX Server", and Apple announced Carbon to provide Classic APIs with minimal changes on OSX.
Furthermore, like COM is pretty much alive (thanks WinDev), some newer Apple frameworks like Metal are actually written in Objective-C (with C++ for the shaders), Swift API for Metal are just bindings.
Regarding point 2, that was thanks to Adobe and Microsoft pressure to keep targeting Mac platforms. Sean Parent from Adobe / C++ fame was a key person in this process.
Also, as much as Apple gets a rep for putting developers on an upgrade treadmill and breaking old apps, they actually aren't the worst offenders. Their internal rule is "don't break existing APIs without a good reason", and that's something they learned from the Rhapsody dustup[0]. You can contrast this with Microsoft and Google, who follow opposing philosophies:
- Microsoft: Don't break existing APIs, period. If the existing one can't be extended, write an entirely new system to replace it (e.g. XAML, UWP XAML) and leave the old system in the OS forever.
- Google[1]: Don't complicate your code with backwards compatibility. If some change would make the code better, scan the entire Google monorepo and recompile the world against your new version, and then tell our AppEngine customers they have about a week to transition.
[0] Carbon wasn't deprecated until 64-bit Intel support happened, and was only removed alongside 32-bit Intel support. A Carbon universal binary can target a disturbingly large range of macOS versions - basically Mac OS 8 up until macOS Catalina.
[1] Mercifully, the Chromium and Android teams actually don't buy into this.
Well, the documentation for Objective-C/C++ has mostly been removed. It's all Swift based how-tos, videos and learning material. You have to hunt Google for getting anything. You get better material for Objective-C/C++ on the LLVM home page. Most of the old Objective-C links are dead.
Perhaps I should have said feature frozen on-the-way to deprecation instead. All new development in lang/ux is happening in Swift/SwiftUI.
