Issue 732

24^th October 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I should have waited a week to talk about Liquid Glass! Just three days after I wrote last week’s comment, Apple decided to introduce an optional but significant change to UI opacity.

If you’d like to take a look at the new setting to switch Liquid Glass between “Clear” and “Tinted”, Dan Barbera has a short, to-the-point video that demonstrates it.

I installed the beta and gave it a try, and I have to say it’s a huge improvement for me. It’s not completely opaque, and the glass effect still exists, but the readability in apps like Mail, Photos, and Apple News is significantly improved.

Obviously, having it as a system setting isn’t ideal for developers, as we’ll now need to test how apps look with both styles, but I can’t see it introducing too many problems if you have already done the work to adopt Liquid Glass. It’s not a huge change, it’s just a more opaque version of what we already have.

One advantage of it being a toggle in Settings is that it’ll also provide analytics data for Apple. I’m sure Apple will be collecting anonymous stats on how many people switch it on and keep it on.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this option quietly disappears in a future release and this level of opacity becomes the default. It feels like a clear win to me.

– Dave Verwer

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News

Sarah Perez reports on the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) ruling, which starts the process of defining new rules and regulations for iOS, Android, their app stores, and browsers. There will be no immediate changes, as the regulatory process takes time and Apple has already pushed back against the decision and will likely launch an appeal. I’d expect this to eventually lead to an EU-like third-party app store situation.

Tools

Jeff Verkoeyen recently decided to see how much it would cost to add CI to his Sidecar app. GitHub Actions is great for the first 3,000 minutes per month, unless you’re using macOS runners, in which case the allowance is 300 minutes. 😬 The other options didn’t fit his budget, either. He ended up with two M4 Mac mini machines and an old laptop, and while the setup cost is higher, it pays dividends more quickly than you might think.

Code

If you think @MainActor is the solution to all your Swift concurrency problems, I’d urge you to read Bruno Valente Pimentel’s latest article. It’s well written and approachable, and he gives pragmatic advice that’s the result of real-world experience:

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s working software that’s incrementally better than yesterday.

He finishes the article with a list of three ways that he “embraces the imperfection” of dealing with Swift concurrency in a large legacy codebase. It’s definitely worth a read.

Is Matt Massicotte going to tell you not to use singletons in his latest article? Well, kinda, but it’s not that simple. He has a couple of ways of working around the fact that you likely have one or more singletons lurking in your codebase, with options for making them thread-safe.

It’s 2025. We have iOS 26, and we finally have the technology for a close button! 😂 Seriously, though, as Natalia Panferova explains, there’s an important difference between closing and cancelling.

Unlike the existing cancel role, which indicates discarding edits or abandoning progress, the close role doesn’t imply data loss. It doesn’t perform any automatic dismissal by itself but provides internal semantics that help SwiftUI and the system understand the intent of the button, such as accessibility and platform-consistent presentation.

It’s nice to be able to represent this semantic difference to help SwiftUI conform better to platform conventions. 👍

Design

Talking of Liquid Glass, Rafael Conde posted some fascinating details about the process of adapting Sketch to macOS Tahoe. Does that mean adopting Liquid Glass? Well, kinda. It’s a really good set of posts, I just wish it were a blog post, as I find threads really hard to follow on Mastodon.

Jobs

Senior iOS Engineer @ alba – We have a unique approach to identifying opportunities, entering markets, and scaling our products. This approach puts us on a fast trajectory for maximizing the reach and delight our products create. In just two years since our founding, our products have already been used by over 28 million users. – Remote (within European timezones) or on-site (United Kingdom)

iOS Product Engineer @ Tolan – At Tolan, we’ve built the world’s first voice-native embodied AI companion in a Swift 6 app, working alongside an Apple Design Award winning creative team to bring the Tolan characters to life. We work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in-person in downtown SF. – On-site (United States in CA) with some remote work (within US timezones)

And finally...

“Make something wonderful and put it out there”, or…