iOS Newsletter
Hi folks,
WWDC 2025 left us with over 42 hours of content to explore. The AppIntents framework is getting a lot of attention this year, and if we link that with the new FoundationModels, plus the fact that intents are now shippable through Swift packages, it seems like we have a solid foundation to build exciting new experiences. There’s also a lot of new APIs to explore, so this week we’re starting to peek into some of them.
Enjoy!
Swift
@dynamicCallable in Swift
One of the things we tend to like about Swift is how expressive it is. Swift is also capable of some dynamic behaviors that not many people are aware of. One such thing is the @dynamicCallable attribute and this post describes where you may find it useful.
@concurrent explained with code examples
Swift 6.2 will ship with features that are going to have an impact on everyone: a set of changes grouped under the name of Approachable Concurrency. Getting a good understanding of the actor isolation, threading and why @concurrent is extremely useful is key, so here’s a post on this new annotation.
UI/UX
Create immersive backgrounds in SwiftUI with backgroundExtensionEffect()
Among the plethora of new APIs that Apple has announced at this WWDC is the neat backgroundExtensionEffect which allows content to be extended beyond its original frame so that it can spill below other UI elements, serving as a background. It combines some blurring and mirroring techniques so that we can improve the appeal of our apps.
Donate content to Spotlight and open it using NSUserActivity
Donating app content to Spotlight allows us to expose some of the domain objects to the operating system’s search indexes, so that users can find our content without having to start our app. Tapping on the search result brings them to our app though, so deep-linking is key, but it’s an elegant way to re-engage users with our apps.
SwiftUI updates
If you have not discovered it yet, Apple has a documentation page dedicated to the updates to the SwiftUI framework that we can use to get an overview of the changes grouped by areas - accessibility, text, UIKit integration, etc.
Automatic Observation Tracking in UIKit and AppKit: The Feature Apple Forgot to Mention
Peter Steinberger discovered that iOS 18 and macOS 15 secretly ship with automatic observation tracking for UIKit/AppKit. Upon enabling it with a plist key, our views should magically update when our @Observable models change.
Virtualization
How to Use Apple Container, the Open-Source Docker Alternative in Swift
container is a tool that can be used to create and run Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines on your Mac. It’s written in Swift, and optimized for Apple silicon. Being able to consume and produce OCI-compliant container images allows us to pull and run images from any standard container registry. Even more—we can also push our images to those registries and run them in any other OCI-compliant application.
Website
Ask WWDC
As AI is everywhere recently, here’s a website that allows you to explore the topics in this year’s WWDC through chatting with a large language model (LLM). Quite a smart move, this one!