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Written by Andyy Hope

Issue 758

10th July 2026

Written by Andyy Hope

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G’day, iOS Dev weekly subscribers.

My name’s Andyy, and I’m one of the new authors of this emblematic newsletter. I’ve been a longtime subscriber and have even been featured once or twice in these weekly editions, so it’s a real honour to now be a part of the team.

I was looking back through my inbox to see how long I’ve been reading it, and the earliest issue I could find was Issue #97 from June 1, 2013. Absolutely wild. 🤯

Anyway, a bit about myself… I’m an iOS engineer based in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve been part of this wonderful community for quite a while now in one capacity or another; writing blogs, giving talks, attending meetups and conferences, and everything in between.

In my spare time, I love heading to the mountains each winter to chase the snow. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I’ve decided to build my first snowboarding and skiing tracking app, Yewki.

These days, I’m fascinated by how the AI movement is changing the way we work and making so many aspects of software engineering accessible to people all over the world. It’s such a fast-moving space, and it’s brought a level of excitement to app development that I haven’t felt since the App Store first launched.

– Andyy Hope

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News

GPT 5.6: Sol released

We’re in the middle of another frontier model battle this week, with the release of OpenAI’s GPT 5.6: Sol, and Anthropic extending access to Fable 5 for a few extra days, and on top of that a weekly refresh of tokens. All us token goblins are eating good this week.

Code

SwiftUI Performance

One thing I’m super passionate about is performance and tooling. Artem provides a excellent post about the basic of agentic skills, and the lifecycle of a SwiftUI view. A great read and something I’ll be adding to my arsenal.


Splitting Large SwiftUI Views in the Apple way

Speaking of SwiftUI, Emre writes about how to split those monolithic SwiftUI views with the @ViewBuilder macro, do’s and don’ts.

Tools

Control the Simulator with AI

Antoine van der Lee has been working on making agentic development and testing better with the RocketSim (paid) MCP. I haven’t had a chance to try this out myself just yet, but it’s definitely something I’m keen to sink my teeth into after I get back from vacation.


MCP for Safari

It’s really a desktop Safari automation tool, but since iOS Safari uses the same WebKit engine, you can point it at your site with a mobile-sized viewport to catch layout/CSS issues before they hit an iPhone. It can’t actually drive the Simulator or a real device though, so it’s more of a quick proxy check than true iOS testing.

And finally...

I’m off to New Zealand to (finally) test my app and celebrate my birthday. I was hoping to launch Yewki in June but the Southern Hemisphere season has been off to a terrible start. See you on the mountain!