Those Who Swift - Issue 268
Your weekly dose of Swift!
Weekly note ✏️
WWDC is getting closer and closer, and this time it feels less like gentle notification sounds and more like a huge bell ringing about upcoming changes. AI Agent videos are already appearing outside the usual WWDC flow, leadership changes are making headlines, and many are even speculating that this could be one of the last conferences where Tim Cook still takes such a central role on stage.
Of course, Apple is presenting technologies that have been in development for years, not just between conference cycles. Whatever we see this June will continue shaping the ecosystem for many years ahead. That’s why this period always becomes the season of wishlists. Developers start sharing hopes for iOS, visionOS, tvOS, Swift, Xcode, and everything around them. Better multitasking, smarter Siri, more open frameworks, improved AI integrations, fewer restrictions, and more stability.
One topic that keeps surfacing again and again is SwiftUI. Despite all the progress, many developers still struggle with hidden behaviors, unpredictable rendering, navigation edge cases, and debugging complexity. Discussions around “SwiftUI should become open source” appear more frequently every year. Not because developers dislike the framework, but because they want to understand it better, contribute fixes faster, and build more predictable architectures on top of it. Swift itself became stronger after opening up to the community, and many wonder whether SwiftUI could benefit from the same path.
But expectations are tricky things. The lower they are, the easier it is to be surprised in a good way.
So instead of asking about cold expectations, let’s ask something different: what change would genuinely make your everyday development experience better?
Justas here… 🙋♂️
I would like to share something you might find valuable.
My friend Simonas and I launched a 100% FREE invoicing tool called - Invcly
Nothing super fancy, just a simple invoicing tool that allows you to send and track invoices. The main reason we built it is because I was tired of paying $20 a month for invoicing software, paying extra for features, for more saved clients, and other upsells. Companies always find ways to charge you more.
With Invcly, you can:
📌 Create and track invoices.
📌 Save clients.
📌 Create and save templates.
📌 Send recurring invoices (still in beta).
📌 Create different products.
And most importantly, it’s always FREE. No hidden fees or hard paywalls (you know what I’m talking about).
Feel free to use it, share it with friends, and most importantly, send me an email with any bugs or features you would like to see.
Enjoy, and let’s make invoicing simple and free! 🧾
Swift Around the Web 🌐
Swift Task Lifecycle Management - Structured vs Unstructured Concurrency
Sagar Unagar shows why concurrency structure in Swift is not just a style choice, but something that directly affects task lifetime, cancellation, error propagation, and UI consistency. His guidance is refreshingly clear: start with structured tools like async let, TaskGroup, and SwiftUI’s .task, and only move to unstructured Task or Task.detached when the work is genuinely independent.
Read more.📍Level: Advanced
UniqueBox, Ref, And MutableRef In Swift 6.4
Artem Mirzabekian explores how Swift 6.4 expands the language’s ownership vocabulary with UniqueBox, Ref, and MutableRef, giving developers more precise tools than class boxes or unsafe pointers for expressing heap ownership and scoped access. A useful way to read this addition is as a split between storage and access, which makes these types especially relevant for lower-level libraries, custom storage, interop layers, and performance-sensitive code.
Read more.📍Level: Advanced
Coding 👨💻
Making A SwiftUI Sheet Automatically Size To Fit Its Content
Daniel Saidi shows a neat workaround for one of SwiftUI’s missing sheet features: sizing a sheet to its actual content instead of forcing it into .medium, .large, or a guessed fixed height.
Read more.📍Level: Intermediate
Working With The Keychain In iOS
Natascha Fadeeva explains the Keychain through its core query model, showing how the same dictionary-based structure powers save, read, update, and delete operations for sensitive data like passwords and tokens.
Read more.📍Level: Intermediate
Refreshing And Animating Views Using TimelineView In SwiftUI
Natalia Panferova shows how TimelineView gives SwiftUI a clean way to reevaluate views on a schedule, which makes it especially useful for clocks, timed refreshes, and visuals that need to stay in sync with time. A helpful distinction in her article is that TimelineView belongs to the UI layer, while Timer is still the better fit for background work, data refreshes, or logic that should live outside the view.
Read more.📍Level: Intermediate
Apple 🍏
Upcoming Changes To Age Ratings In Australia And Vietnam
Apple is updating App Store age ratings in Australia and Vietnam on June 18, 2026, with Australia dropping the 15+ category and Vietnam introducing local age ratings aligned with national law. The key thing for developers is to revisit the App Store Connect age rating questionnaire now, since existing ratings may be recalculated automatically from the answers already on file.
Read more.📍
Design 🎨
Making Accessibility Accessible
Bas Broek lowers the barrier to accessibility work by focusing on practical tools like Voice Control labels, Hover Text, and the VoiceOver caption panel instead of starting with deep theory. The most useful takeaway is that accessibility becomes easier to improve when teams can quickly see what assistive technologies expose and spot where labels, traits, or element exposure break down.
Read more.📍Level: Intermediate
Other cool stuff 🧰
Modern Isn’t A Value. Fit Is.
Omar Elsayed argues that “modern” APIs like async/await, actors, or new architectures are not automatically better when they make the surrounding codebase harder to read and integrate with. The most useful takeaway is the boundary rule: modernize internals when it helps, but keep external APIs aligned with the system your team already speaks.
Read more.📍Level: Advanced
In Praise Of SwiftUI
SwiftUI’s biggest win may not be “UI in Swift” at all, but the reactive data flow that keeps complex interfaces in sync without so much manual plumbing. Sarah Reichelt makes a grounded case for treating it as the default choice for speed and maintainability, then reaching for AppKit or UIKit only when a real gap, bug, or performance limit shows up.
Read more.📍Level: Intermediate
SwiftUI Should Become Open-Source
Max Seelemann argues that SwiftUI still struggles with core platform behaviors like keyboard focus timing and macOS drag and drop, which makes Apple’s “best way to build an app” promise harder to defend. His bigger point is that open-sourcing SwiftUI could speed up fixes, reduce its dependence on OS release cycles, and give developers a way to help move the framework forward where Apple has been too slow.
Read more.📍Level: Intermediate
AI 🤖
Anthropic Co-Founder Chris Olah’s Remarks On Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas”
Chris Olah argues that AI should be examined not only by the labs building it, but also by outside critics willing to question its broader social and moral impact. He centers that case on three concerns in particular: global inequality, human flourishing, and how little we still understand about advanced models, while candidly noting that commercial and geopolitical pressure can push frontier labs away from acting responsibly.
Read more.📍
Tutorials 📒
Create And Style App Shortcuts In iOS Using AppShortcutsProvider
Shankar Madeshvaran walks through the full App Shortcuts flow, from AppIntent and AppShortcutsProvider setup to branded tiles with custom tint, solid backgrounds, gradients, and Light/Dark variants. Shortcut styling lives in Info.plist and asset catalogs, not Swift code, and the same branded look also carries into Spotlight results.
Read more.📍Level: Intermediate
Video 🎥
Decoupling SwiftData in SwiftUI: Is It Worth It?
Mohammad Azam uses a practical SwiftData and SQLite example to show how a protocol-based DataAccess layer can decouple persistence from SwiftUI views, while also exposing the real cost of that abstraction. This pattern gives flexibility and cleaner boundaries, but you lose SwiftData conveniences like automatic UI updates and can end up with more architectural weight than the app really needs.
Watch here.📍Level: XXX
One more Thing 🎮
W.W.D.C. 2026: The Pregame Quiz
Jordan Morgan turns pre-WWDC nerves into a smart trivia round built from the year’s Apple news, App Store policy updates, hardware launches, and community lore. It works as more than a quiz, really — a fun way to refresh the details developers are most likely to want in their heads before the keynote.
Play here.📍
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