Issue 766

4^th September 2026

Written by Andyy Hope

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

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News

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.

Code

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.

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

Tools

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.

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...

One of the other editors mentioned this in our super secret exclusive Slack chat and thought it might provide a bit of nostalgia to our wonderful readers. It’s a modern port of the After Dark screensavers from the ’90s, which are claimed to be works of art worth preserving. Check out the afterglow app.