Issue 771

9^th October 2026

Written by Juan Marin

Comment

I’ve spent this week at next.app devCon in Berlin, which has been a reminder of why conferences are worth the trip. The talks are good. The hallway, the expo floor and the dinners afterwards are better. And one talk, on Monday, put words to something I’ve watched happen for most of my career.

Janina Kutyn’s talk was called “Driving User Engagement”, and it was a gambit. What she actually gave us was a reflection on how much of people’s lives now happens around a phone they didn’t mean to pick up, and on how small changes to a journey can give someone a sense of being done instead of a reason to stay.

It usually goes like this. A team wants to know whether the app is useful. Usefulness is hard to count, so someone picks a proxy, usually sessions or minutes. The proxy goes on a dashboard. Two reorganisations later nobody remembers it was a proxy, and the roadmap is full of features whose only job is to move it. Nobody decided to build something that keeps people stuck. It settled there, one sensible quarter at a time.

None of that makes the people involved villains. Product managers are asked to show growth, and minutes are what the analytics tools hand you by default.

For most of what we build, time in app is the wrong number. Games and reading apps are the honest exception, because there the minutes are the product. Everywhere else, the fix isn’t a lecture. It’s a better number. Count finished tasks, and how quickly someone gets from opening the app to the thing they opened it for. Apple is already handing families better tools to see and limit screen time. Once people can see the minutes, the minutes stop being a compliment.

I asked Janina after the talk whether there was anything written to share with you. Not yet, so watch this space. In the meantime, if your dashboard can’t tell the difference between someone who loves your app and someone who can’t put it down, change the dashboard.

See you next week.

– Juan Marin

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News

Apple’s notice on Full Disk Access reads like a response to a story rather than to a bug. It promises tighter controls for an “extraordinary level of access”, points at AI agents, and stops there: no API, no timeline. Jeff Johnson thinks he knows what prompted it. He recorded Meta Muse’s first run and found nothing that grants the permission behind your back. The app can only open the Settings pane, and going further takes an admin password, which, he argues, makes the viral account of Muse reading someone’s messages unasked look like a forgotten setup screen.

His worry is the right one for us. Permissions tightened in response to a headline land on the developers who were using them properly, and nobody wants macOS to turn into the Vista parody Apple once used to sell Macs.

Certificate expiries are the dullest kind of news and the most expensive to miss. The original Developer ID intermediate runs out on 1 February 2027, and the line Apple has drawn is worth understanding. Notarised apps with a secure timestamp are fine, because the timestamp proves they were signed while the certificate was valid. Installer packages get no such grace: a .pkg signed with an affected certificate simply stops installing.

That asymmetry is the reason to act now if you ship a .pkg, plug-ins and enterprise tools especially. Generate the replacement from the G2 authority, choose G2 Sub-CA when asked, and remember that Apple says the new certificates still expire every year.

Most of Apple’s new-hardware announcements are invitations. This one comes with a deadline. Duo-optimised builds can go in now with Xcode 27.1, the phone ships on 23 October, and from April 2027 any app or game submitted needs iPhone Duo screenshots.

That’s Apple turning adoption into policy, and I think it’s a fair move. A new device stands or falls on whether the store looks right on it, and, as the platform citizens piece in Articles explains, big apps have every reason to wait. Screenshots are a modest ask, unless you localise into twenty languages. They also mean that by spring someone on every team will have opened their app on the inner screen and looked properly.

Code

Maciej Szamowski profiled his Mac calendar with 100,000 events and found the main thread busy updating SwiftUI’s graph (about 577 ms of one 762 ms hang) while the database contributed half a millisecond. The hover effect he removed is the detail people will remember. The wider point is how much work quietly hangs off small interaction details in a dense view.

He’s also frank about the tools. Instruments only became usable for this in Xcode 27, and recordings over about 50 seconds could churn for an hour and then crash on his M5.

Jeroen Leenarts starts from the assumption that the model won’t be there. His note editor has to work on a phone without Apple Intelligence, or while the model is still downloading, and the suggested tag and title are an optional layer on top.

That framing changes the code in small, sensible ways. A @Generable struct whose @Guide steers the tag towards a fixed list (with a check in code in case it strays), a half-window token guard, every error returning nil because the user’s words are already on screen, and an Evaluations test with a 0.8 bar on twenty notes he tagged himself. The line to pin up comes near the end: “Build the screen that works with the model turned off.”

Tools

Every sponsor and attendee I could find this week whose product is built on top of the simulator, the UI testing and automation tools so many of us depend on, got the same question: what did Device Hub do to you? I watched a few smiles switch off before anyone answered, and nobody had to tell me how many late nights their summer had cost them. What came back was a pattern. Compromises, shorter feature lists and, more than once and a little quieter, “we’re thinking about whether to keep the product at all”.

What’s left is a game of cat and mouse. Developers are rebuilding the shape their muscle memory knew for a decade. Samuel Abada’s OpenDeviceHub puts back a window per device and the old shortcuts, and Vadim Katenin’s SimParcel restores drag and drop. For headless runs, tddworks’ Baguette covers what idb lost when its input call stopped working in iOS 26. Apple is putting pieces back as well, and Xcode 27.2 beta 2 already fixes modifier keys and input on simulators older than iOS 18. But OpenDeviceHub and Baguette both load private frameworks from Xcode, so the next release can undo them too, and a documented layer under the simulator is the only way the chase ends.

Article

Scott Berrevoets explains why the apps with the biggest teams are often the last to adopt anything new, and it isn’t a lack of skill. LinkedIn took two years to ship dark mode. Big companies plan quarterly or twice a year, well before Apple rolls out its updates, and a platform feature has to show it moves a company goal without hurting another metric. Most can’t, because people who can’t book a ride through Siri just open the app.

I hope you never have to argue for something your users plainly want against a spreadsheet that can’t see it. His closing point is the one I’d keep: at larger companies, craft tends to come from individual engineers doing it as a passion project.

This is the deep dive of the week, so give it an unhurried hour. Most of us learnt SwiftUI modifier order by trying both and keeping whichever looked right. For offset, rotationEffect and scaleEffect, Mihaela Mihaljević Jakić replaces that habit with a rule: the modifier closest to the view applies first. It’s the Core Graphics law read from the other end, which is why .offset then .rotationEffect orbits in SwiftUI while “translate, rotate” spins in place in Core Graphics.

She ends with four rules you can use without the maths. Put .offset after a scale if you want the distance in the parent’s points, and remember that a .frame before a rotation moves the pivot. Keep it bookmarked for the next animation that ends up somewhere you didn’t expect.

And finally...

Swift’s Float.pi has been a hair too small, on purpose, since the very beginning, and this week Stephen Canon’s proposal to round it properly was accepted. It opens with Indiana’s 1897 attempt to set pi by law, and somehow, 129 years later, nobody thought to hold out for Pi Day. 🥧