Snapp Mobile iOS Newsletter

Issue 25 • January 31, 2025

Hello again,

This week saw releases on all Apple platforms. Have you upgraded your testing and coding devices yet?

Enjoy the newsletter!

Apple

Introducing the Advanced Commerce API

App Store faces yet another upgrade, this time in the form of the Advanced Commerce API. It’s an opt-in feature that requires an application, but our apps have to qualify for one or more of the following: exceptionally large content catalogues, creator experiences, and subscriptions with optional add-ons.

CI

Linting a Swift package with swift-format

As we are working on open-sourcing something quite cool sometime soon, our very own Oleksii Kolomiiets came up with a targeted set of instructions on how to lint Swift packages using the copy of swift-format that’s now shipping with Xcode 16. You don’t want to miss this one.

UI/UX

Implement Face ID Authentication in the iOS App

Face ID was a highlight feature when the iPhone X was released 8 years ago. Since it’s now on almost every new device, it’s a solid foundation for security-driven features. This article explains how to implement it.

Color mixing in SwiftUI

One of the new features in SwiftUI that came with iOS 18 is the addition of a color mixing API. Although the API is in fact a simple method, it can have some creative applications.

Syntax Highlighting SwiftUI Code with Swift Syntax

Have you ever wondered what it takes to copy a color-coded snippet the way Xcode does? In answering this question, the article also explores how swift-syntax works under the hood..

Using MetricKit

MetricKit has been around since iOS 13, and this article serves as both a reminder of its usefulness in spotting problems and a refresher on how easy it is to adopt.

Utils

The “Additional Tools for Xcode” archive that you can download from Apple’s Developer portal is full of useful small utils that can help you debug or setup an environment for your codebase. One such utility is the Network Link Conditioner - a settings panel that lets us simulate slow network connections while developing. This article shows us how.

Swift AST Explorer

If you start writing a Swift Macro for a project, you may soon discover that working with the Swift Abstract Syntax Tree can be tricky. This website looks like quite a handy tool for analyzing a code’s source tree.