Issue 766

4^th September 2026

Written by Andyy Hope and Greg Fawson

Comment

G’day y’all!

Pretty monumental week for Apple… Tim cooked, now it’s John Ternus. I remember when Tim first took over, it was an incredibly sad time for all of us with the passing of Jobs, and there was a lot of doubt about how anyone could follow in those footsteps. It did take a while for Cook to find his footing, but once he did, in the latter half of his tenure (IMO), he was off to the races.

Considering Ternus is known as a “hardware” person, I’m really excited to see where he takes the company as the new CEO. With the next event due in less than a week, all eyes will be on Apple to witness the beginning of a new era.

Speaking of App Store, after 16 years building apps for other people, my very first app Yewki has finally launched. If you’re a snowboarder or skier, this one’s for you! It only took 3 weeks, 5 failed submissions, and many, many sleepless coding nights to get here, but I’m proud of the effort I put in and the overall product.

If you’re at NextApp SwiftCon conference next month, I’ll be giving a talk about how I developed it in this new age of AI.

– Andyy Hope

Andyy mentioned the “Surprise and Shine” event next week that we’re all looking forward to. Everyone and their mother expects Apple’s first folding iPhone to show up alongside the iPhone 18 Pro line.

It is worth remembering (stating the obvious here) that Apple is not inventing the folding phone. Samsung’s been shipping the Galaxy Fold since 2019. Huawei, Oppo, Google and heck…even ZTE (I helped them organize an Android hackathon for a very cool device back in 2018) they’ve all had years to figure this out. So it’s worth asking: how did that actually go for developers?

Kind of roughly, honestly. Six years in, “my favorite Android app still has giant black bars on my foldable” is a genre of complaint that never really went away. It got bad enough that Google eventually stopped asking nicely. Android 16 started actively penalizing apps that hadn’t adopted large-screen/adaptive layouts, and there’s chatter that Android 17 is still trying to mop up the mess. That’s not a knock on Android specifically. This is what happens when a form factor shows up and adapting to it is optional. Most developers, understandably, prioritized the other 500 things on their plate, and a fold-shaped hole in the UI became somebody else’s problem, indefinitely. The market for foldables is still nascent enough that I don’t think everyone has made it a massive priority.

Apple’s got one advantage Android never did: it controls the SDK, not just the guidelines. iOS 27 betas suggest simply rebuilding against it opts your app into resizable-iPhone behavior. Unlike Android, there is no separate fold flag to remember. Nothing here is Apple-confirmed yet, just betas and a little intelligent guess-work. I for one am excited to see how it goes for iOS devs with the new form-factor.

– Greg Fawson

News

Phil Schiller reportedly steps down as Apple's App Store and product event chief

Eddy Cue is coming back to the App Store, which I have mixed feelings about, but I also acknowledge the fact that the dynamics of the App Store have changed since his previous tenure, especially in recent years with the influx of new submissions since AI became much more common in app development. I think it will be a net positive to have a (near) fresh set of new eyes on how the operations could be improved.

Swift Talk podcast ends after 500 episodes

After more than ten years and over 500 episodes, Chris Eidhof and Florian Kugler have ended Swift Talk. They started objc.io in 2013 to share in-depth solutions to real iOS and Swift problems, and launched the podcast in 2016. Through books like Advanced Swift and Thinking in SwiftUI, plus weekly videos and workshops, they’ve helped countless developers level up. For many of us, this podcast has been a trusted resource and a pillar of the community. A sad but significant moment.

Code

Why Swift is introducing a warning for weak captures within nested closures

Who doesn’t love a good retain cycle problem and language fix? John details the new retain cycle warning when referencing self within a closure, within a closure.

Effective Geometry: Layout Without `UIScreen.main`

Artem gives a nice breakdown on GeometryReader and how to use it effectively instead of the UIScreen.main we’ve become accustomed to.

Tools

4x Simulator performance with this one weird trick

The folks at MobAI have found a way to drastically slim down the memory footprint of the simulator by culling the unused background services that typically aren’t used in development. I haven’t had a chance to use this yet, but I’d imagine folks with rented or local Mac mini GitHub runners would hugely benefit from this.

Cross-platform Xcode replacement. Build and deploy iOS apps with SwiftPM on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Another CI-runner-related thing I came across the other week was xtool. The author of this repo claims that this tool enables compiling iOS apps on Windows and Linux systems. I could see some folks utilising a spare PC around the house as a spare CI runner to get some signal on their builds at the very least. I wouldn’t recommend uploading the build artefacts to App Store Connect though.

And finally...