iOS Newsletter
Hello dear reader,
As we wait for iOS 18.3 to get released officially sometime next week (assuming that the many reports are correct), here’s a list of the articles that caught our attention this week.
Enjoy the newsletter!
Apple
Apps without trader status will be removed from the App Store in the EU
In case you need another reminder that you need to set the trader status on App Store - here it is, from Apple themselves. In their own words:
“Due to the European Union’s Digital Services Act, apps without trader status will be removed from the App Store in the European Union until trader status is provided and verified, if necessary.”
Sounds like there’s a bit of good news still - you may be able to recover your apps upon providing the trader status even past the deadline.
Profiling
Debugging SwiftUI views: what caused that change?
SwiftUI’s diffing algorithms are very, very good, but sometimes figuring out the reason for a view to redraw can be a challenge. Thankfully, both Swift and Xcode ship with helpers to give us this data - read the article to learn how.
Threads iOS performance
Here’s an article that shares no code but gives us an insight into what the considerations and lessons learned from shipping and maintaining Meta’s Threads app are. It’s full of lessons with the most important one being that making a great enterprise app takes a lot of persistence and iteration.
UI/UX
Exploring Tab View Styles in SwiftUI
TabView is one of these “magical” view containers in SwiftUI. It’s extremely flexible - depending on just one view modifier, it can make the app UX drastically different without changing the source code at all. This article walks us through the many faces of it.
Observing properties on an @Observable class outside of SwiftUI views
The @Observable macro has proven very useful with SwiftUI. So much so that we may think to explore using it in a different context. If that’s the case - this article gives us the basics on how to do it.
Integrating Live Activity and Dynamic Island in iOS: A Complete Guide - Part 1
We’ve stated quite often that shipping a LiveActivity for our apps is among the things that make it a “good citizen” of the iOS ecosystem. Not only that, but it can also be a way to get users’ attention back to our app should a certain event happen. If that’s not enough - it’s also an opportunity to show your content on the user’s home screen and around the dynamic island with ease.
How to check if a modifier key is pressed when clicking on a menu bar item in macOS apps
Here’s an on-point article on varying your app content based on the modifier key that’s pressed when the menu bar icon is clicked. It never ceases to amaze us just how much flexibility there is on macOS.
The Book of Shaders
Writing shaders may look like witchcraft to most developers, but fear not. This resource is gold as it covers the basics and guides us through very detailed explanations of the techniques used to write shaders. It’s a website that is receiving updates, so we’ll keep an eye on it. It may be just what we need to get some magic in our apps.