Snapp Technology
Hi folks,
Swift is finally hitting the metal in a big way. Between Apple’s KernelKit slipping into the kernel and a full-blown Swift-based OS, the ‘it’s just for apps’ era is officially over. On the UI front, iOS 27 finally fixes some of the most annoying parts of SwiftUI toolbars and reordering, so we can stop fighting the framework for five minutes. We’ve also got a cautionary tale on SwiftData migrations that’ll save you from a few launch-day crashes, plus some native IoT tooling from AWS and a new Swift-powered container tool from Apple.
A lot to chew on this week. Enjoy!
Articles
Swift
Swift Package Index joins Apple
Ted Kremenek, Dave Verwer, Sven A. Schmidt
Swift Package Index finally joined Apple, and honestly, it’s a win for all of us. We can still rely on it for package discovery and those crucial compatibility checks without worrying about it disappearing into a corporate black hole. It’s staying open source, and they’re promising new stuff like package signing, so our project dependencies might actually get a bit more secure.
Apple Internals: Swift in the Kernel
Apple is moving Swift into the kernel with this new KernelKit thing. We’re seeing the Embedded Swift runtime pop up in macOS 27’s pthread kext, though the core of XNU is still stuck in C/C++. It looks like they’re just laying the plumbing for now, which is exactly how you avoid breaking everything at once.
AWS IoT Device SDK for Swift is now generally available
AWS gave us a native Swift SDK for IoT at last. No more wrestling with wrappers when we want to build secure device fleets on iOS or macOS. It’s got the usual suspects—Device Shadow, Jobs, and TLS 1.3 support—so we can actually build production-ready IoT apps without the headache.
swift-os — a real operating system, written in Swift
Someone actually went and (vibe?) wrote a whole OS in Swift. It’s not just a “hello world” kernel; we’re talking a native TCP/IP stack, an HTTP server, and even an AI inference server, all running on Embedded Swift. It’s experimental, sure, but it’s a hell of a way to prove that Swift can live comfortably at the metal.
UI/UX
New SwiftUI APIs for reordering and drag and drop on iOS 27
We can do proper reordering in LazyVStack and LazyVGrid without writing a mountain of custom coordination code now. iOS 27 gives us .reorderable() and .reorderContainer(), which basically means the system handles the animations and placeholders while we just update our model. It’s about time these APIs hit iPhone and iPad.
Taking control of toolbar items in SwiftUI
Toolbars in SwiftUI can be a nightmare of “where did my button go?” on different platforms. The new .visibilityPriority and ToolbarOverflowMenu give us a way to actually control what stays visible and what gets hidden. Plus, .toolbarMinimizeBehavior is a nice touch for those of us who want the navigation bar to get out of the way when the user scrolls.
Data
Adopting SwiftData for a Core Data app
Moving from Core Data to SwiftData sounds like a dream until you hit your first schema mismatch crash. Emre shares a practical “room by room” migration strategy, highlighting the critical need to match the legacy SQLite schema exactly on the first pass. It’s a great reminder that “cleaning up” the model while migrating is a one-way ticket to a fatal error.
VM
container
Apple just open-sourced a tool called container that lets you run Linux containers as lightweight VMs on Apple Silicon. It’s written in Swift, OCI-compatible, and requires macOS 26. Finally, a way to handle containers on Mac that doesn’t feel like a hack.