Is SceneKit depricated ?

Hello! SceneKit is not deprecated, and both SceneKit and RealityKit have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, SceneKit has a more flexible rendering pipeline and is supported on watchOS and tvOS. However, RealityKit was designed for AR and has better integration with our AR frameworks/tools than SceneKit. So you should use which framework works best for you.

Is it still worth to develop a game in SceneKit? SceneKit is deprecated now.

Technically speaking, SceneKit is only "soft deprecated". It is in maintenance mode and will only receive major bug fixes. Apple said there are no plans for a hard deprecation at this time.

Thanks, that's correct, but you never know when it might be "hard deprecated". I've been working on a game for two years now as a solo developer, and I think it'll take at least one or two more years for me to finish. Switching to RealityKit would mean almost a complete rewrite for me, so I'm unsure whether I should proceed with rewriting the game in RealityKit—or maybe it would be better to switch to Unity instead.

Id say it depends on the complexity of your game and features you plan to use. I have a 7 year old scenekit game i just started to port over to realitykit for learning reasons and i keep hitting wall after wall.

i have a rockband clone with a 3d selection menu. This menu can have 10s of thousands of songs. Scenekit handled this no problem but in reality kit i cant get the same performance and i havent even loaded textures like cover art. just learned that it doesnt do material instancing so each object is a draw call. I spent two days trying to find out how to do it

then there is swiftui. As soon as i add a couple of textviews on top of my scene cpu usage spikes even when idle. Scenekit has spritekit overlays that can do very complex rendering with little overhead.

lastly i cant wrap my head around changing scenes. Scenekit scene presentation and transitions are easy to understand, with realitykit seems like i need to empty the scene and repopulate it Losing my music menu state and having to reload all the assets again. With scenekit i can elegantly transition back to the selection menu just as i left it.

i wouldnt worry about a game in scenekit breaking in future OSs. Realitykit has a long way to go and imo scenekit is way more flexible. Im quite shocked how slowly it was progressed. scenekit matured just a couple of years after introduction.

SceneKit is soft-deprecated and we suggest using RealityKit if you are thinking about making new games.

To learn how to bring your existing SceneKit projects to RealityKit, see Bringing your SceneKit projects to RealityKit. This article and sample code project are associated with the WWDC25 session Bring your SceneKit projects to RealityKit.

If you see any issues bringing over your projects to RealityKit or see any missing features, please file a request via Feedback Assistant.