Issue 768

18^th September 2026

Written by Konstantinos Nikoloutsos

Comment

Hello, iOS Dev Weekly readers 👋 It’s me Konsta.

Wait, Xcode 27.2 is already in beta? Where’s the iPhone Duo simulator? Oh, that’s coming in 27.1. 😅 The SDK and simulator support arrive later this month, and I’m looking forward to testing our apps against it. Juan and Alex covered the homework required to support iPhone Due last week; having the simulator in our hands should make that work much more concrete.

But there’s something in Xcode 27.2 I’m happy to see already. Raise a glass for every merge conflict you’ve hit editing project.pbxproj on a team. 🍺 The new JSON-based project configuration format, project.xcproj, is designed to make diffs easier to read and reduce merge conflicts. I still remember using Sourcery and the effort it took just to link a generated file to the right target. Editing project.pbxproj meant more merge conflicts for our team to resolve. This change would have saved us some headaches. Apple has also published xcode-project-format, a Swift library for working with the new format. Rob Napier captures the mixed feelings around the timing the improvement is welcome, but it’s a little frustrating to feel that helping AI agents got something moving that developers had wanted for years.

Enjoy this week’s issue!

– Konstantinos Nikoloutsos

Sponsored Link

Mobile teams deal with a firehose of incoming issues: regressions from QA, beta feedback, App Store reviews, crashes, etc. AI code makes managing this even harder. Triage by Runway pulls every issue into one inbox, de-dupes, assigns, and tracks fixes so nothing is missed. See how it works.

News

Being able to verify that a photo was actually captured by a camera feels like a meaningful step towards trusting the images we see. I’m glad Apple is working on this.

Swift 6.4 is here, bringing new Swift language capabilities, better debugging, and the same build engine for Swift Package Manager on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Code

I like articles that give us a way to investigate performance instead of guessing. Natalia Panferova shares the -LogForEachSlowPath YES launch argument, which helps identify when a ForEach inside a List or lazy stack produces a variable number of views per element. A condition that looks harmless can make SwiftUI evaluate content for offscreen elements.

Tools

A month ago, in my company, I learned it the bad way that Apple has maximum build size limits for apps uploaded to App Store Connect. That’s why Jacob Bartlett’s OpenBundle caught my attention. This open-source tool analyses your IPA and gives you a visual breakdown of the bundle, highlights duplicate files, and suggests ways to reduce its size. The analysis runs locally in your browser and it reminds me of the old Emerge Tools X-Ray. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but with Jacob behind it, my expectations are high. You can also explore the code on GitHub and check the .ipa here.

And finally...

Apple has added an easter egg in iOS 27. If you scroll to the bottom of the Liquid Glass demo, you will see it, as Aaron shared in his recent X post.