Issue 712

16^th May 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Apple announced the Swift Student Challenge winners last week, and I’m delighted to have three of them – Tamera, Marina, and Mayank, helping with this week’s newsletter. Every link below has been curated and commented on by these students, but before we get to the links, I’d like to tell you more about them.

When Tamera Middlebrooks was diagnosed with a balance disorder at 20, she couldn’t find an engaging app for her therapy exercises. So, she built her entry to this year’s challenge, Sway. It’s a physical therapy companion app with symptom tracking and animated exercises. Originally a community organiser who co-founded a non-profit as a teenager, Tamera got serious with coding in 2022 and hasn’t looked back. She sees software as “a powerful outlet for creativity” that brings ideas to life and her journey shows how personal experience can fuel the development of great apps that help others.

Mayank Tiku has always been fascinated by electronics, designing custom PCB boards for home automation and tinkering with electronics projects. That background gave him a head start with app development and it only took him a few minutes with Xcode to love Swift. His challenge app is Neura, designed to teach ML concepts, and he wants to inspire others to find the same passion for changing the world through creating apps.

When her grandmother faced evacuation during the recent LA wildfires, Marina Lee was inspired to act. Her challenge app is EvacuMate, which helps users prepare emergency checklists, store vital documents, and access real-time resources during disasters. Marina’s tech journey began in middle school through a mentorship programme pairing young girls with women in tech, and she now leads hackathons and is a member of USC’s Women in Engineering board.

Talking with the three challenge winners was inspiring, but this line from Marina stood out. She described a mentorship programme she participated in during middle school:

I worked closely with my mentor on a coding project and presented at a showcase for fellow mentors/mentees at the end. At first, I remember being intimidated – as a young girl, tech often felt like a space where I didn’t quite belong. But this experience made me feel more confident as I was surrounded in a supportive, inclusive community. Seeing how creativity and code could address meaningful, real-world issues inspired me to learn more about programming, and eventually pursue software development in college and ultimately as a career.

I love this. It’s great to see mentorship programmes and challenges like the Swift Student Challenge inspire young people to enter this industry.

I’d also like to thank Tamera, Mayank, and Marina for selecting and commenting on the links below, and give my congratulations to all the challenge winners. Enjoy your time at Apple Park!

Before I wrap this up, just a quick note to say that there will be no iOS Dev Weekly for the next two weeks. I’ll be back on June 6 with a pre-WWDC issue, though!

– Dave Verwer

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News

Apple’s latest accessibility updates genuinely impressed me, not just for their range, but for the intention behind them. Braille Access stood out, offering integrated support across Apple devices, from app launching to note-taking and Nemeth Braille calculations. It’s a meaningful move toward improving usability for visually impaired users. I also appreciated the new Accessibility Nutrition Labels, which will save time and frustration for anyone searching for apps that meet specific accessibility needs, while encouraging developers to treat inclusivity as a baseline, not a bonus.

As someone who’s implemented screen-reader support using Swift/Xcode, I’ve seen how powerful accessibility can be when prioritized from the start. I’m glad to see Apple expanding text customization tools as part of that. Finally, Vehicle Motion Cues might be my favorite update. Motion sickness is common (I’ve dealt with it for years), and addressing it as a real UX issue shows how accessibility can improve comfort and usability for everyone, even with the smallest of changes.

– Tamera Middlebrooks

I would argue the greatest barrier of entry for native iOS app development at this stage is the cost of a Mac. Personally, when I first started my app development journey, I bought an old refurbished M2 Mac Mini. Since it only had 8GB of RAM, development was a little tiring. In fact, I even encouraged my friends to try Swift but they couldn’t since they did not own a Mac.

It is great to see how the Swift community is creating tools such as xtool, a project that allows users to build and develop apps with Swift Package Manager on Windows and Linux, to make Swift more available to everyone. It will be extremely interesting to see how Apple deals with such projects from a legal standpoint, as their monopoly on native app development is a significant source of revenue.

– Mayank Tiku

Code

It was really great to see how Cihat Gündüz uses his package, ErrorKit, in a meaningful and collaborative way to improve the Swift developer experience. We’ve all run into cryptic error messages that might make us even more frustrated and confused than before, so seeing that it encourages improved error messages through community collaboration seems very practical and empowering. I liked that the examples provided show how just a bit of context or clarity can make debugging far less complicated. Coding is not always a solo activity; it’s the small contributions from individual developers that can collectively make a big difference across the ecosystem.

– Marina Lee

Even though I have not extensively used notifications myself, this article was quite insightful on uses for local notifications. Instead of having to create an APNs server just to run simple push notifications, using local notifications would be a strong alternative for time-sensitive or location-bound notifications. For instance, a game with a daily streak feature could send a notification to your phone if you haven’t completed a daily mission. By using local notifications, you can reduce server load and save storage space, since such data will not need to be tracked by the server for notifications.

– Mayank Tiku

Natalia Panferova’s article stood out to me because it clarified some of the hidden powers of SwiftUI’s Text view, especially around formatting. There were some great examples of how Swift can handle common tasks elegantly, like displaying dates and measurements using format styles directly inside string interpolation. I appreciated how she emphasized localization and clean code. As a developer who values readable, declarative syntax, it’s great to see how this modern approach is used to create user-friendly text outputs with minimal code.

– Marina Lee

Although LLMs allow developers to write code extremely quickly, the quality of the code they write can vary dramatically. Many developers tend to use LLMs as a copilot, commonly known as vibe coding. I found it interesting how the community has created systems that integrate Xcode with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) created by Anthropic. These systems allow LLMs to provide higher quality feedback and require fewer prompts because of the accurate contextual information from Xcode. Seeing how Xcode, Apple, and the community support the advancement in AI will be interesting and I am looking forward to all the new developer tools that we will have access to!

– Mayank Tiku

Design

I appreciated many of the points in this article by Daniel Devesa Derksen-Staats, especially the reminder that accessibility is often treated like a checklist or afterthought. Too often, developers build based on their own experiences—“if I don’t struggle with this, clearly no one else does.” But that mindset leaves entire user demographics out. Empathy and diversity are essential in tech, and we need to build with other perspectives in mind besides our own. I also liked the point that accessibility is a process, not a one-time goal. Just like personal growth or app development, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Completing an audit and fixing a few issues doesn’t mean the work is entirely done. Finally, I appreciated the focus on culture change over compliance. That reminded me of my community organizing background, where I taught and learned that real change has to be built in, not sprinkled on. Especially now, with DEI efforts under attack, we need to keep advocating for diverse teams and inclusive design.

– Tamera Middlebrooks

Business and Marketing

I really enjoyed Stephen Dixon’s article because the creator did what all entrepreneurs are encouraged to do: create a solution to a real problem. Forming healthy habits and monitoring what we eat is still a challenge for a lot of people (myself included), I feel he came up with a solution that’s both simple and genuinely useful. It feels obvious in hindsight, but sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

His experience with trying out different apps in search of one that fit was also relatable: he couldn’t find one, so he created one. It makes the app feel honest and intentional, while being a great example of how AI can be used in a meaningful and productive way. I also appreciated the SLC (Simple, Lovable, Complete) philosophy. It challenges the traditional MVP mindset and reframes it as building something small but whole in its own way.

– Tamera Middlebrooks

Jordan Morgan’s emphasis on shifting the developer mindset from focusing solely on code to a marketing perspective really resonated with me. As indie developers, promoting your app effectively is just as important as building great features. The author provided great tips such as using email lists to reach engaged users and tracking paid ad performance with clear metrics. I’ve personally dabbled in marketing using email/social media through my hackathon-organizing involvements, but it’s fascinating to learn about how the tools mentioned such as Mailerlite and the spreadsheet template provide an organized, metric-focused experience. I’ll definitely try these out once I start publishing my apps!

– Marina Lee

And finally...

Dave and Bus… 🙅‍♂️