Issue 737

19^th December 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I’m back from my vacation, which was exactly what I needed, and I now find myself writing the last issue of 2025! How did that happen? 😱

To mark the end of the year, Apple announced this year’s App Store Award winners! You can see the full list of awards and winners on the developer site, although I actually prefer their press release writeup as it includes screenshots of the apps. As always, there are some outstanding winners in the list. I especially liked the Be My Eyes app, which restored some of my faith in humanity. It’s such a simple idea, and it brings nothing but good into the world. ❤️ Congratulations to everyone who was nominated, and also to the winners! These awards, combined with the Apple Design Awards, have been inspiring people to make better apps for many years, and long may they both continue.

As always, it’s been a pleasure to have you all continue to read this newsletter for another year. This year has been a bit exhausting, but I’m tremendously excited about 2026, and after last week’s vacation I’m feeling refreshed and ready to go.

Happy holidays, and I’ll speak to you all in the new year! 🎊

– Dave Verwer

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News

This is a tricky one, in my opinion. I agree that copycat apps in the App Store are a bad thing, and these new guidelines to strengthen protection against copycats are in principle a good thing, but the devil is always in the details. Could this affect innocent developers who are simply trying to compete, as well as “pure” copycats? The rules look good as written, but the review process is imperfect.

Tools

Adrian Ross, following up on his previous article about developing apps with Zed, this time covers how you can work with Xcode in the background and a small AppleScript to get SwiftUI previews on whatever file you’re working on in Zed. 👍

Code

The LLM coding agents are pretty good at writing Swift and SwiftUI. However, because both these technologies have changed significantly in the years they have been around, the agents will sometimes use old or outdated techniques. You can fix some of that with a set of ground rules, and Paul Hudson has put together a great collection to get started with. Oh, and even if you don’t use a coding agent, the list of tips in Paul’s AGENTS.md are good for humans, too! 🤖

Can you run Swift on a Raspberry Pi? Of course you can! I enjoyed this article from Jesse Zamora where he digs into the various Pi devices (Pies? 🥧) that can run it, and then goes through a step-by-step example of using the swift-sdk-generator to get hummingbird-examples running on either a 64-bit or 32-bit Pi. Follow along and have some Swifty fun with that Pi that is still sitting in its box on your shelf.

What a very cool package from Dennis Müller:

Tessera is a Swift package that turns a single generated tile composed of arbitrary SwiftUI views into an endlessly repeating, seamlessly wrapping pattern.

It only does that one job, but check out the README file for examples of how good it looks. It’s perfect for subtle backgrounds in an iOS app.

Business and Marketing

I liked this quick tip from Wesley de Groot on how adding alternate app names can make your app easier to launch and find in Spotlight. It’ll only take you three minutes to implement, which is a great value for your time! 👍

And finally...

It’s not Swift-related, but here’s something to keep you busy over the holidays!