Issue 753

5^th June 2026

Written by Sriyank Siddhartha

Comment

WWDC 2026 isn’t about new features. It’s about whether Apple will finally ship AI that works, or disappoint again.

This is my first iOS Dev Weekly, so let me introduce myself.

I’m Sriyank Siddhartha, Head of Developer Community at next.app devCon. Twelve years ago, I ran my first mobile app and fell in love with building. I taught myself, then taught others - millions through my YouTube channel and my Pluralsight courses. It never stopped: Android, Flutter, Kotlin, React Native, and now iOS.

Writing this issue feels like a chance to explore mobile development from a fresh angle. With AI, framework lines might blur over time. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy building mobile apps.

Apple’s pressure this year is credibility, not features. At WWDC 2024, they announced Apple Intelligence with an AI-powered Siri. The demo was impressive. The release kept getting delayed. Now WWDC 2026 on June 8 is explicitly framed as showcasing “AI advancements”.

iOS 27 is reportedly a “Snow Leopard-style” release: focused on squashing bugs, improving battery life, and rewriting chunks of the OS instead of stacking flashy features. That’s not a bad thing. It’s exactly what a platform needs after years of accumulated complexity.

But the industry is watching the AI roadmap more carefully this time.

This week’s wishlist posts from respected developers make that clear. Majid is asking for Foundation Models image input, lazy custom layouts, and SwiftUI view recycling. Michael Tsai rounds up the community’s broader asks: quality improvements, AI skepticism, SwiftUI pain points, and better Xcode automation. Jan Van Rijn goes further - predicting agentic development, MCP for App Store Connect, and App Intents becoming essential. The pattern is clear: developers want Apple to fix what’s broken before shipping what’s new.

What developers do in the next 18 days, after the beta drops, determines how fast they can act on the answers.

– Sriyank Siddhartha

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News

Michael Tsai gathers the main questions around WWDC 2026: will Apple’s AI actually work, what’s the real status of labs after the pandemic, is the new design language sustainable, and what are the Design Awards telling us about Apple’s priorities. A strong set-the-scene item for WWDC week.

Tools

An unusual and technically interesting tool for Swift developers. SwiftTUI brings SwiftUI to the terminal. It provides an API similar to SwiftUI for building text-based user interfaces: stacks, .frame(), .padding(), ScrollView, TextField, buttons with arrow key navigation, ANSI colors, bold/italic/underline text, and @State, @Binding, @Environment property wrappers. The goal is to resemble SwiftUI in API and inner workings while making sense for terminal apps.

Code

Neal Hoeger explores SwiftUI animation timing, covering animation curves, easing, spring animations, timing parameters, and the CustomAnimation protocol. A practical guide for developers who want precise control over their SwiftUI animations.

Fatbobman explains how Observation can bring property-level reactivity ideas to Core Data, why that matters for SwiftUI mental models, and where the trade-offs are. Deep technical content about Core Data architecture and modern SwiftUI integration.

Matt Massicotte explores stateless actors in Swift concurrency. Advanced Swift concurrency topic about actors without internal state, useful for developers building concurrent code with clear isolation boundaries.

And finally...

This author literally killed SwiftUI by migrating an entire iOS app to UIKit in one week. Controversial, but worth reading for the balance.