Issue 770

2^nd October 2026

Written by Andyy Hope

Comment

G’day y’all.

Woof. What a start to the week…Google shipped a malformed remote config for Firebase SDK that appears to have broken most (all?) apps that depend on it. It’s not the first time an outage of this scale has happened, back in 2020 a similar remote config update for Facebook SDK brought down half of the App Store. Each time an event like this happens, I see a surge in debate around the dangers of dependencies.
It’s impossible to ignore the real frustration and anxiety outages like this can cause developers, but reducing the lesson to “dependencies are bad” misses the nuance. Still, not all dependencies are the same, and we as developers can be intentional about how we approach certain types of dependencies to ensure our apps are Built to Last.

On a more positive note, RevenueCat’s Shipaton concluded this week. I entered Yewki. I’m not expecting to win anything, but it was a fun experience to be a part of nonetheless. If you haven’t entered before, I highly recommend doing so next year. All contestants get plenty of free goodies to help the development process.

– Andyy Hope

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Tools

Artem details how SF Symbols has added a new CLI tool, and shares some really neat ways to make it usable for agentic development. As someone who has spent a few hours manually exporting symbols, this is going to be a real boon for my workflow.

Code

Omar has a neat little write-up about Swift 6.4’s new withTaskCancellationShield. If you’ve ever needed some cleanup work to finish even after its task gets cancelled, this one’s worth a read.

Dani Devesa Derksen-Staats’s blog “Accessibility up to 11!” fully lives up to its name. In this article, he demonstrates a whole range of advanced accessibility techniques and features that go well beyond the bare minimum of accessibility support.

John Sundell details how to extend your usage of some beyond the realm of SwiftUI, like avoiding type erasure, reducing complexity, or improving the ergonomics of some APIs.

And finally...

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