Setup iOS Project without Storyboard

Storyboard first introduced on iOS 5 is a feature for building UI (User Interface) on iOS app. Storyboard allows us to quickly build a UI because the process is done visually with little or no coding.

Storyboard Pros

Easy to use, Storyboard is designed for creating UIs quickly and easily. Storyboard uses a drag-and-drop mechanism to build the UI.

Great for prototyping, You may have no time to build UI with code. Here, Storyboard comes to the rescue to help you build your UI many times faster than coding.

Storyboard Cons

Makes code review harder, Storyboard generates XML code when you make UI changes in your Storyboard files. XML code generated by Storyboard is harder to read and it makes the code review process much harder than without Storyboard files.

Hard to refactor, At the time you might have to refactor your UITableViewController into UICollectionViewController or from one view controller type into a different view controller type, it’s hard to solve if you use Storyboard because you need to delete the entire view controller you want to change and this is risky.

Setup a project without Storyboard

The first thing you need to do is create a new iOS project with UIKit using Xcode and remove the Main.storyboard file, if the Xcode shows the option to remove let’s select Move to Trash.

Next, open the SceneDelegate.swift file and change the body of the scene method onto code like below

var window: UIWindow?

func scene(_ scene: UIScene, willConnectTo session: UISceneSession, options connectionOptions: UIScene.ConnectionOptions) {
  guard let windowScene = (scene as? UIWindowScene) else { return }

  window = UIWindow(windowScene: windowScene)

  let viewController = ViewController()
  let navigationController = UINavigationController(rootViewController: viewController)

  window?.rootViewController = navigationController
  window?.makeKeyAndVisible()
}