It's no secret that Swift concurrency can be pretty difficult to learn. There are a lot of concepts that are different from what you're used to when you were writing code in GCD. Apple recognized this in one of their vision documents and they set out to make changes to how concurrency works in Swift 6.2. They're not going to change the fundamentals of how things work. What they will mainly change is where code will run by default. In this blog post, I would like to take a look at the two main features that will change how your...

As Swift evolves, a lot of new evolution proposals get merged into the language. Eventually these new language versions get shipped with Xcode, but sometimes you might want to try out Swift toolchains before they're available inside of Xcode. For example, I'm currently experimenting with Swift 6.2's upcoming features to see how they will impact certain coding patterns once 6.2 becomes available for everybody. This means that I'm trying out proposals like SE-0461 that can change where nonisolated async functions run. This specific proposal requires me to turn on an upcoming feature flag. To do this in SPM, we need...

A lot of modern apps have a networking component to them. This could be because your app relies on a server entirely for all data, or you’re just sending a couple of requests as a back up or to kick off some server side processing. When implementing networking, it’s not uncommon for developers to check the network’s availability before making a network request. The reasoning behind such a check is that we can inform the user that their request will fail before we even attempt to make the request. Sound like good UX, right? The question is whether it really...

SwiftUI offers several approaches to building lists of content. You can use a VStack if your list consists of a bunch of elements that should be placed on top of each other. Or you can use a LazyVStack if your list is really long. And in other cases, a List might make more sense. In this post, I’d like to take a look at each of these components, outline their strengths and weaknesses and hopefully provide you with some insights about how you can decide between these three components that all place content on top of each other. We’ll start...

In Swift, we have several ways to “suspend” execution of our code. While that’s almost always a bad practice, I’d like to explain why Task.sleep really isn’t as problematic as you might expect when you’re familiar with Thread.sleep. When you look for examples of debouncing or implementing task timeout they will frequently use Task.sleep to suspend a task for a given amount of time. The key difference is in how tasks and threads work in Swift. In Swift concurrency, we often say that tasks replace threads. Or in other words, instead of worrying about threads, we worry about tasks. While...

Once you start using Swift Concurrency, actors will essentially become your standard choice for protecting mutable state. However, introducing actors also tends to introduce more concurrency than you intended which can lead to more complex code, and a much harder time transitioning to Swift 6 in the long run. When you interact with state that’s protected by an actor, you have to to do so asynchronously. The result is that you’re writing asynchronous code in places where you might never have intended to introduce concurrency at all. One way to resolve that is to annotate your let's say view model...

Singletons generally speaking get a bad rep. People don’t like them, they cause issues, and generally speaking it’s just not great practice to rely on globally accessible mutable state in your apps. Instead, it’s more favorable to practice explicit dependency passing which makes your code more testable and reliable overall. That said, sometimes you’ll have singletons. Or, more likely, you’ll want to have a a shared instance of something that you need in a handful of places in your app: class AuthProvider { static let shared = AuthProvider() // ... } In Swift 6, this will lead to issues because...

A key skill for every app developer is being able to profile your app's performance. Your app might look great on the surface, but if it doesn’t perform well, it’s going to feel off—sometimes subtly, sometimes very noticeably. Beautiful animations, slick interactions, and large data sets all fall flat if the app feels sluggish or unresponsive. Great apps respond instantly. They show that you’ve tapped something right away, and they make interactions feel smooth and satisfying. To make sure your app behaves like that, you’ll need to keep an eye on its performance. In this post, we’ll look at how...

Okay. I’m using the term indie developer loosely here. I don’t consider myself to be an indie developer. But I am independent, mostly. I run my own business where I work on client apps, workshops, my books, this website, my YouTube channel, and more. So I think I qualify as indie, partially. Either way, in this post I’d like to explore something that I don’t write or talk about much. How do I, as someone that manages my own time and work, make sure that I stay productive (in a sustainable way). A lot of folks that I’ve talked to...

Swift Concurrency provides us with loads of cool and interesting capabilities. For example, Structured Concurrency allows us to write a hierarchy of tasks that always ensures all child tasks are completed before the parent task can complete. We also have features like cooperative cancellation in Swift Concurrency which means that whenever we want to cancel a task, that task must proactively check for cancellation, and exit when needed. One API that Swift Concurrency doesn't provide out of the box is an API to have tasks that timeout when they take too long. More generally speaking, we don't have an API...