I can’t speak for AppKit, but UIKit/Cocoa Touch was pretty rough early on. Major chunks of “standard” functionality were missing and standard widgets were somewhat inflexible. It was common to pull in third party libraries and write custom widget code for relatively basic things.
Based on my experience, the UIKit dev experience didn’t start to reach the level of completeness it’s known for now until some time between iOS 7 and 9… at least that’s when I remember the number of “required” third party libraries start to steeply decline.
Based on my experience, the UIKit dev experience didn’t start to reach the level of completeness it’s known for now until some time between iOS 7 and 9… at least that’s when I remember the number of “required” third party libraries start to steeply decline.