Issue 751

22^nd May 2026

Written by Dave Verwer, Greg Fawson, Sriyank Siddhartha, and Zachary Powell

Comment

Today is the start of something new for iOS Dev Weekly. The newsletter now has a new owner and new writers, but will continue to have the same commentary and links from around the community that have made it what it is over the past 750 issues.

Finding the right people to take iOS Dev Weekly forward was tricky. I’ve talked with a few companies over the last couple of years, but none had quite the right fit. Greg and the team at Mobile Seasons, better known to developers as droidCon, were different from our very first meeting. Yes, they have something to promote, but their priority is to keep this newsletter running as it is, covering Swift and Apple-platform news and community blog posts. They’ve also promised that they’ll keep the “And Finally…” link going!

I can hear some of you asking why I’m doing this, and why now, and those are certainly valid questions. First, doing something for almost 15 years is a long time, and on a personal level I’m looking forward to being able to focus on something else. Specifically, I’ll be working full time on the Swift Package Index, which has already been a huge part of my work life for the last six years.

My iosdevweekly email address now redirects to the new owners, and please feel free to reach out to them! If you’d like to send me personal mail, you can email my personal address. You should also follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon as I’ll talk about my future plans more there.

I’ll sign off now and let Greg, Sriyank, and Zachary introduce themselves. Thank you for reading everything I had to say here over the years. Next week will be entirely written by the new authors, and I hope you all give them a warm welcome. ❤️

– Dave Verwer

Hi iOS Dev Community!

As Dave mentioned, most people know us as droidCon and we’ve been supporting developer communities since 2009. In addition to our global series of droidCon and flutterCon events, we’re actively building the world’s largest gathering of mobile app developers next.app devCon coming to Berlin this year and the US and India in the coming years. An integral part of that is the 3-day, multi-track swiftCon.

When we learned Dave was looking for a new home for iOS Dev Weekly, getting involved was a no-brainer, especially because we’d been in a similar situation before with our friends at ProAndroidDev.com Back in 2018, they needed to step back, and we felt it was too valuable a resource for the community to have it disappear. We feel the same way about iOS Dev Weekly.

So what do we intend to do with iOS Dev Weekly? Just keep it going! Our goal is that every reader of iOS Dev Weekly will open the newsletter and see the same familiar commentary and have access to a slate of carefully curated articles each Friday. If we do our job right, the transition will feel seamless.

In the coming weeks we’ll be building out an editorial team of experienced iOS devs who will be curating the newsletter content and ensuring that iOS Dev Weekly continues to be the place where iOS devs stay informed. Zach, Sriyank, myself and the whole team are excited to be part of this community!

– Greg Fawson

Sponsored Link

SwiftCon is coming to Berlin as part of next.app devCon, the largest gathering of mobile app developers. We’re opening the CFP for iOS builders who go beyond tutorials: SwiftUI in production, architecture decisions, performance wins, and hard trade-offs. If it shipped, it belongs here. Submit your talk today.

Code

A clear, concise breakdown of the two main animation approaches in SwiftUI — the animation(_:value:) modifier and withAnimation — including when to reach for each one and how to chain animations using the completion handler added in iOS 17. A good reference to bookmark even if you’ve used both before.

Feature flags tend to start as a scattered collection of booleans and environment checks; this article shows how to build a proper type-safe, thread-safe, priority-based system in Swift from scratch — including SwiftUI environment integration and an in-app toggle screen for QA. A solid blueprint if you’re tired of ad-hoc flag handling in a growing codebase.

A compiler bug that shipped in Xcode 26.5 and appeared to be a known issue at release time prompted this well-argued opinion piece on why Swift toolchain versions should be independently selectable — much like simulators are today. If you’ve ever been forced to downgrade Xcode just to dodge a Swift regression, you’ll find yourself nodding throughout.

If you’re working on a large Bazel-based iOS project and tired of full rebuilds just to test a UI tweak, this practical walkthrough shows how to wire up InjectionNext for hot reloading — including the specific linker flags, dependency setup, and a useful patch the author contributed upstream to make it all work with rules_xcodeproj.

A really nice deep-dive into why WKWebView eventually falls short for serious reading apps, and how the author rebuilt Yuedu Reader around a native CoreText pipeline. Key insight is that a renderer isn’t just something that draws glyphs, it’s the system that preserves meaning all the way from EPUB parsing to user interaction.

Business and Marketing

A timely reminder that for solo SaaS products — especially AI-powered ones — plain Postgres plus your own backend often beats wiring together a BaaS from the start. The author makes a compelling case for keeping your data model portable and your business logic firmly server-side, before you’ve even found your first 100 paying users.

Videos

In this episode, we are joined by Andyy Hope, a developer renowned for his focus on “beautiful code” and his extensive experience across a wide range of codebases. We explore the hidden qualities that elevate a project from functional to impressive and discuss how much weight he gives to aesthetic and interesting code when reviewing conference submissions.

Andyy shares his perspective on what has been missing from the global conference circuit and highlights the unique advantages of this year’s event. We also dive into the evolution of Swift as it moves beyond the mobile app space, discussing the growing need for sessions that focus on the language itself, regardless of the platform.

And finally...

Are you seeing double? Or is something else going on? 🤔