Issue 364

10^th August 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Last week I talked about a recent controversy with apps that used VPN APIs for things that they were not intended for. This week brought with it more hiccups after a change in policy around gambling apps caused quite a few removals from the store. To sum it up, apps that involve gambling of any kind (either real or simulated) must now be on the App Store account of a corporate entity rather than an individual.

I think the change itself is probably reasonable given the regulations and liabilities around gambling. It’s also a good sign that Apple are continuously looking at the rules of the App Store and tweaking them where it makes sense. What I think could be handled so much better though, as with many things that Apple does, is the communication around the changes. It appears that the review guidelines are not yet updated with the new policy and the method of communication to affected developers seems to have been an email which arrived after their apps had been removed from the store.

I haven’t mentioned yet that the removal process in this instance also seemed to be a bit over zealous with several false positives being reported. I don’t think this is worth talking much about as it seems to be a mistake which is getting quickly corrected. However that would have been so much simpler to determine if the change had been communicated clearly.

The ironic thing is that better communication would benefit Apple as much as it would us developers. Instead of Twitter and blogs exploding with overreactions to every change, Apple could get out in front of the conversation and quash the controversies before they explode. At the very least, the App Store guidelines must start getting updated to accompany policy changes, but I think a news post or similar before they happen would also be a great step forward.

Dave Verwer

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News

The real number is much, much lower of course as many apps will be rejected for issues during review only to then be allowed through once they are resolved. Even so, that’s a much higher percentage than I would have guessed at!

Tools

SwiftLint is a fantastic tool for keeping your code standards in check, but what about Storyboards and XIBs? With checks for accessibility labels, ambiguous/misplaced views and a font check to make sure there’s no rogue fonts hiding in a storyboard, I really like this.

When I saw this it felt familiar and I thought I had linked to it before, but searching the archives tells me I hadn’t! Thanks to Jonathan Wight for reminding me of it! Too many links…

Universal links are cool, but testing them can be hard. Luckily Ethan Huang is here to make it easy! 😀 This tool downloads your association file and allows you to test it as well as providing shortcuts to the Apple and Branch validation tools.

I saw this tweet by Felix Krause this week and it seemed like a good idea to remind everyone that during this period of almost weekly new Xcode releases, you don’t need to go to the Xcode downloads page every time!

Code

I’ve been following Paul Hudson’s tweets about his new app for teaching Swift using his Swift in 60 seconds content. Yesterday saw him release the code to GitHub. This isn’t just a release of the content (although that is included), but a release of the app itself, including all of the quiz functionality for you to look through and learn from.

Just note that this code is not open source, yet!

I agree with Nathan Gitter that the Designing Fluid Interfaces presentation from WWDC this year was outstanding. It was focused on concepts and design rather than implementation though. What if someone had put together the examples used in the talk into a project that was available on GitHub? Thanks Nathan!

After talking about stack views inside scroll views last week, Maciej Trybiło was kind enough to let me know about ScrollingStackViewController which packages the same technique up into a library. Just subclass ScrollingStackViewController and add your child view controllers. 👍

I feel like the days of truly massive application delegates are thankfully behind us, but that doesn’t you won’t find them becoming a bit of a dumping ground if not watched carefully. We’ll all be familiar with that code that started as “Oh this is just one line of code in didFinishLaunching” that ultimately grew to become much bigger. Vadim Bulavin has some techniques to help you keep it under control.

Firebase seems to be taking over the world a bit, but before you commit to it for your next project read Andrew Bancroft’s case for CloudKit. I still think if you’re building something truly serious then rolling your own back end is probably the way to go, but I do like CloudKit too.

Books

Server side Swift certainly hasn’t gone mainstream yet, but with Vapor hitting 3.0 recently it might be something you’ve thought about learning. If that’s the case then this book looks to be a great way to get up to speed. Just a note for full disclosure, I asked for a review copy of this book as it looked interesting and was provided with one.

Oh and congratulations to Ray and the team on the new site design. It’s certainly come a long way from the early days!

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