Issue 708
18th April 2025
Written by Dave Verwer
Comment
Every time I read my RSS feeds and see an article about top App Store earnings, a little part of me dies. It’s not news that the vast majority of revenue spent on apps is in free-to-play games; that has been the reality of the app stores (both Apple and Android) for many years. However, it continues to depress me!
I’m not saying that free-to-play games are badly written or terrible quality¹ and it’s not even about the companies who create them. Those companies see the opportunity and are taking advantage of it, and that’s just capitalism. Warts and all. What depresses me is how popular they are and how many people must be addicted for them to make this much money.
I know it’s not the worst problem in the world right now, but it’s not great how the App Store turned out all these years after it debuted. That said, it’s not the entire App Store and it reminds me to be grateful for all of you who are creating useful and worthwhile software that doesn’t exploit people’s addictive tendencies. Thank you for doing what you do.
Dave Verwer
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News
Securing the Future of the CVE ProgramReading this post from John Gruber was a rollercoaster. First, I was devastated to learn that US government funding for the world’s CVE program ended this week. Then, I was delighted to learn they’ve spent the past year working on a non-profit to do the same job. The CVE programme is too important, and I’m so glad it will continue.
Tools
Using Instruments to profile a SwiftUI appThis article from Donny Wals has some great, practical tips on using Instruments with SwiftUI. Combine this with the new tutorials from Apple that I linked to a few weeks ago and you’ll be an expert in no time!
Code
Creating MCP Servers in SwiftArtem Novichkov has a great write-up of how to create a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server using the official Swift package. MCP is something I’ve wanted to check out, and this example is a perfect quick start. He creates a server that returns the currently installed Swift version and queries it from Copilot in VS Code. This is a great article.
Swift Measurements
I enjoyed Sarah Reichelt’s ode to Apple’s excellent Measurement framework. It’s the kind of framework you might not reach for immediately, because how hard can it be to convert centimetres to metres, right? But it has plenty of time-saving features that make it worthwhile.
Using NavigationPath with TabView in SwiftUI
Can tab views and navigation views play nicely together? Natascha Fadeeva’s latest article tackles the creation of a router that handles state management for these containers, but the concepts apply if you’re dealing with either of them independently!
swift-snapshot-testing-macros
Apple’s new swift-testing package has been a great success, and it’s wonderful to see the community start building a second layer of packages to integrate other popular testing libraries. Adam Carter’s new library includes a Swift macro to make working with swift-snapshot-testing an absolute breeze.
Videos
Videos from try! Swift Tokyo 2025try! Swift Tokyo was happening just a few days ago, and the organisers already have the entire set of videos available if you were not able to make the trip to Japan. Why not enjoy a few of them this weekend?