iOS Engineer @ Scandit – You will play a critical role in making our core computer vision technology available on the iOS platform. You will be in charge of our App Store apps as well as our SDK, helping to create engaging user experiences around barcode and object recognition scanning with AR technologies. – Remote (within European timezones)
iOS Developer @ WillowTree Digital – WillowTree is North America's largest privately-held digital product agency. We partner with many of the world's most iconic brands to develop elegant, highly-functional mobile & web applications used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. We offer remote & hybrid-flexible & incredible culture – Remote (within US timezones) with some on-site work (United States in NC, OH, or VA)
iOS Engineer @ Bending Spoons – We leverage advanced native iOS technologies and break new ground with our own powerful libraries that make architecting and developing the highest-quality iOS apps as smooth and efficient as it gets. We’re looking for passionate iOS engineers (mobile+platform) to bring our apps to the next level. – Remote (within European timezones) or on-site (Italy)
iOS Developer @ Okta – The future is passwordless. Okta is revolutionizing how users authenticate on their devices with FastPass. The expert iOS team at Okta is looking for amazing iOS developers to help them define the future of identity. Apply today to embark on an exciting journey and give your career a boost! – Remote (within US timezones) with some on-site work (Canada or United States)
Principal Software Engineer @ Alaska Airlines – We are innovators and creators, striving to continually improve our award-winning technology in ways that make travel simple, enjoyable, and seamless. We’re looking for a lead subject matter expert on native app development as we reimagine the Alaska App used by millions of our guests. – On-site (United States in WA) with some remote work (within US timezones)
Senior iOS Software Engineer @ ESChat – ESChat is the market leader in secure wireless Push-to-Talk communications supporting first responders, transportation, hospitality, logistics and more. Join our iOS team and work to support these teams in getting their jobs done faster, safer and more efficiently. – Remote (within US timezones)
Senior iOS Developer @ Komoot – You’ll team up with world-class iOS engineers and take over responsibility for our iOS app. Touching all parts of the iOS app, your work will make outdoor adventures easily accessible to our users. You’ll develop diverse features for navigation, routing, social interaction and content visualization. – Remote (within European timezones)
Humbly Confident Senior Mobile Developer @ You Need A Budget (YNAB) – YNAB is growing, and so is our development team! We’re a software ecosystem that includes personal budgeting apps for web, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Android phones. Our mission is to help our users take total control of their money—not just by using an app (if only it were that easy!), but changing habits and ways of thinking. – Remote
Swift Engineer @ WillowTree – At WillowTree, Senior Swift Engineers have the freedom to create products people love. You’ll collaborate with a cross-disciplinary team to build large-scale products for well-known brands. We look for team members who advocate for software engineering best practices and inspire their team to continuously learn and improve. – Charlottesville, VA
Senior iOS Developer @ Doist – Joining Doist as an iOS developer means you'll be joining a diverse, remote-first team of 60+ people who are distributed across 25 countries. You'll get to help create tools, like Todoist and Twist, that promote a calmer, more balanced, more fulfilling way to work and live. – Remote
Senior iOS Developer @ Float – Are you Float’s next Senior iOS Developer? As Senior iOS Developer with Float, you will lead the mobile development team to design, implement, test, and deliver in an Agile environment. Float designs and builds mobile products that make our clients’ workforces more effective. – Remote or Morton, IL
Senior iOS Engineer, Swift @ Starry – Tired of your monopolistic cable provider? Join Starry! We are a booming 5G internet company rapidly expanding to more than 20 cities and beyond. Our teams work hard to delight our customers with the best experience. – Boston, MA
Engineering Manager @ onX – Lead the mobile development teams at onX, a Montana based company with the leading off-the-pavement GPS mobile app! As an Engineering Manager, you will manage 10+ talented and fun-loving devs who take pride in empowering our customers to find their way in the wild. Our Engineering team is growing quickly and onX is taking our technology into new outdoor markets... come join the journey! – Bozeman, MT
Did you see Steve Troughton-Smith’s experiments using Midjourney to generate sample album art for his Broadcasts app or to generate app icons this week?
It’s hard to look at Steve’s examples and some of the incredible results that DALL-E and similar projects are generating and not be impressed. At least, I was!
AI is all around us already. Every time you get in your car, your iPhone knows where you want to go. Everyday interactions with Alexa and Siri are all powered by AI, and that’s before considering the emerging future of bots that can mimic human conversation, GPT-3, and these image generation APIs.
But it set me thinking. I had an adverse reaction to GitHub Copilot, and I haven’t changed my mind since writing that, especially on the issues around licensing and attribution. Why wasn’t my gut feeling about these image generation APIs the same?
I think it’s probably something to do with how transformed the raw material appears. With Copilot, I can imagine the code it suggests coming directly from one of the sources. It’s hard to know how accurate that impression is, but that’s how it appears. With GPT-3 or the image generation APIs, it’s harder to make that connection. Maybe it’s because I’m less familiar with those training data sets? It’s no different, though. Thousands and thousands of human artists and authors created the training data these systems run off.
I said I wanted to get on board with these new technologies when I first wrote about GitHub Copilot, and I feel the same way deep down. The world changes all the time, whether I like it or not. It’s been less than 50 years since a computer running at 80Mhz with 8MB (not GB) memory looked like this, and less than 100 years since this photo. I should probably get over myself and move with the inevitable progress these technologies will eventually bring.
The idea that a few giant companies will use this to make even more money from the work of countless thousands of unpaid humans that produced the training data doesn’t feel great, though. Let alone the legal issues that’ll inevitably land in courts over the next few years. They’re making it hard for me to take this grumpy old man hat off for now. 👴🏻
Something struck me as I watched the M1 chip appear in more hardware on Tuesday. It won’t be long until the whole Mac lineup has the same internals.
The “low” end of the Apple silicon Mac lineup now looks complete. The smaller laptops, Mac mini, and smaller iMac all have the same chip inside them, the M1. Yes, some of them have one less GPU core, but that’s such a minor difference it’s barely worth mentioning.
But what about the “Pro” Macs? What about more than 16Gb RAM and high-end GPUs, and all the other things “Pro” users want? I feel pretty confident that Apple will fall into the same consistent cycle for M-series chips that they have been so consistent with while producing the A-series. September will almost certainly bring us an A15 with the new iPhone, and I’d bet an M2 will accompany it with the capability for more memory and story around better or dedicated GPUs. I don’t think we’ll see the entire range of M1 upgraded to M2 chips immediately, but I think we’ll see it happen before the M3 arrives. Maybe the highest-end machines will get more cores via an M2X or similar, but wouldn’t it be great if the whole Mac lineup had their chips upgraded every year, just like the iPhone and iPad do?
Do you know what that would mean? It would no longer be possible to buy a bad Mac! Just pick the form factor you’d like, and that’s it. Do you want a small laptop with a keyboard? MacBook Air. Want a desktop with a built-in screen? The iMac is for you. Which machine is faster for X, or Y task? That is no longer a valid question. It would also mean that there wouldn’t be a bad time to buy a Mac, as you’d never be more than a year behind the latest upgrades.
Why am I talking about this? Especially when I try not to make predictions or dwell on what might be coming next. 😬
The promise of SwiftUI is the software equivalent of the Apple silicon chips. You can’t pick the wrong framework, and your code will (largely) be compatible with any Apple platform. Just choose a platform (or platforms) you’d like to target and start creating.
We may not quite be there today, but we’re moving closer to that reality with every passing year. SwiftUI is the Apple silicon of software frameworks. 🤩
While we wait to see what, if any, changes Apple will make to the App Store due to increasing pressure from legal cases and government legislation, it’s interesting to watch what the other companies are doing.
Microsoft is ready to show its hand, with the updated Microsoft Store for Windows announced this week. Yes, it’s not a mobile store, but I think it’s still worth examining.
It has some familiar features like editorial “stories” that highlight different apps every day, but there are also things we’ve not seen before.
One feature is a “pop-up” store. That could mean lots of things, but in this case, it means a button that you can add to your web page that looks similar to the “Available on the App Store” buttons from Apple. However, this button doesn’t launch a separate store experience where your potential customer gets taken from your web page, which you control, and onto a store page, which you have less control over. Instead, it just takes care of the distribution part. You still own all marketing, and the store handles the download and installation. Of course, there’s also a store page for people who find your app that way, but it’s not mandatory.
That’s a nice feature, but it’s just a warm-up! Next, you can publish a wide variety of apps to the store, and users can install them regardless of whether they use the store’s inbuilt mechanism, or if it’s an MSI installer, a plain old exe
file, or even a PWA.
Then, the big one. As Microsoft put it, you have “flexibility and choice of commerce platform”. If you’d like Microsoft to take care of payment, they take 15% (or 12% for games). If you don’t want them to take care of it, you keep 100% and use whatever payment provider you like.
There’s still a review process, but I can’t pass much judgement on that as I don’t know anyone who has gone through it. Here are the policies (with a detailed change history) if you’d like to take a look.
There may be conditions I’m not seeing, and of course, it’s early days, but this is certainly an interesting move from Microsoft, who have been through anti-trust proceedings before.
It’s worth noting that my hopes for the Apple App Store remain unchanged. I believe that significant changes to app review or allowing alternative payment mechanisms would be a net loss for the platform in terms of the perceived trust and simplicity of the store. But I wanted to report on what Microsoft is doing here. It’s significant.
Senior iOS Engineer @ Cochlear – Take accessibility to the next level by working on iOS apps that control and manage a users’ sense of hearing. Work with custom hardware and a strong focus on device security to build all-native apps that you are proud of. We're looking for someone excited about SwiftUI and Combine, and who cares about great product. Having a passion for test automation would be a bonus! – Sydney, Australia
Senior iOS Developer @ Fresh – We design Apple Award winning apps for startups and enterprise customers like Netflix and Facebook. Join our Swift development team and enjoy flexible work hours from wherever home is. – Remote, or Provo UT
iOS Developer @ Dynamic Signal – Dynamic Signal’s Employee Communication and Engagement Platform is trusted by hundreds of enterprise companies, including more than 20 percent of the Fortune 100, to modernize, streamline, and measure their communication and engagement with one platform to reach all employees, wherever they work. – San Bruno CA
Senior iOS Software Engineer @ pMD – pMD is a fast-growing, highly rated health care technology company rated 5/5 on Glassdoor and has been recognized as a Best Place to Work by SF Business Times, Modern Healthcare, and Inc. We're profitable, have extremely happy customers, and make up a team of people as talented and passionate as you are. We love what we do and care about doing good in the world. – Remote, or San Francisco CA
iOS Developer (Remote) @ komoot – Komoot is changing the way people explore. Our technology empowers millions of people to get outside and discover more of the great outdoors. If you’d like to help to build the future of outdoor exploration - we want you to join us! – Remote
Senior iOS Engineer @ Tally – Tally's goal is to make people less stressed financially and provide full financial automation to every one of our customers, for free. We've raised nearly $100 million in funding and have launched two products: Tally Cards to help people pay down their credit card balances faster, and Tally Save to help people save automatically and earn rewards. – San Francisco CA, or Vancouver BC
Mobile Full Stack Engineer @ Expensify – Expensify seeks a self-driven and collaborative individual passionate about making code beautiful and effective, with a general understanding of and experience in JavaScript, Android and/or iOS SDKs, and mobile design patterns. PHP is a plus, but not a requirement. – London, Portland OR, or San Francisco CA
iOS Engineer @ Issuu – At Issuu, we empower content creators through cutting edge tools, technology, and services. We exist to help creators of long-form, highly visual content build audiences and businesses. You will work on the Issuu products, along with supporting backend and infrastructure in a small, autonomous team of engineers, designers, and product managers to find end-to-end solutions to challenging problems. – Berlin Germany
Mobile Developer @ Bloom & Wild – We’re Bloom & Wild, the UK’s most loved online florist. We’re using technology to reimagine the experience of buying and receiving flowers, connecting people more thoughtfully to make sending flowers a joy to send and a delight to receive. In doing so we're aiming to become Europe’s most loved flower brand. Recently named as the second-fastest growing tech company in the UK by Deloitte – London UK
Senior iOS Developer @ Dr. Bill – Dr. Bill saves time for Canadian doctors by making medical billing delightful (OK... at least suck less). Join us and help lead our team as we accelerate our growth to dominate medical billing in Canada! – Remote, or Vancouver Canada
Senior iOS Engineer @ Argent – Help us reimagine the future of money and the web - putting people, not big corporations, in control. We're backed by Spotify and Slack's investors and aim to build the best product in crypto and fintech. – Remote (in Europe only)
Lead Application Engineer - SwiftUI, Combine, iOS/macOS @ LiveSurface – Build the next generation of LiveSurface products with a focus on SwiftUI, Combine and the newest Apple frameworks. LiveSurface is an industry leader in visualization and image creation tools for creatives. We blend clean UX, proprietary rendering technology and hand-curated content to provide realtime photorealistic visualization to our users. – Remote
iOS Developer (Swift / SwiftUI) @ Clay – SwiftUI + Thoughtful Design + Privacy + Complex Data Science = Clay, the better way to be thoughtful with the people in your life. Lead mobile development and work with a small, passionate team of product people building the most exciting new iOS 13+ product out of NYC. – Remote, or New York NY
Lead iOS Developer @ Atomic Robot – Atomic Robot has the best mobile development team in the City, and is constantly pushing the boundaries on what is possible with Mobile Technology – Cincinnati OH
I’ve been accepting suggestions for links to include in iOS Dev Weekly for years using off the shelf web form software. It worked, but every time someone suggested a blog post, I’d reply by email to thank them and ask if they’d consider being a part of the iOS Dev Directory. Or, when someone suggested a Swift library, I’d reply and ask if they would add it to the Swift Package Index. I have snippets for both those emails, but it was still a chore.
So I set myself a fun little project last weekend to save myself some typing. I built a custom site to accept link suggestions. It asks the same questions as the form did, but if you’re submitting a blog post or a Swift package, it automates the work I used to do manually and suggests next steps. I’d love it if you checked it out.
Why am I telling you this? I thought it might be a good reminder of three things:
But, even better than that…
Trying to stay aware of new voices and projects in the community is something I’ve been working hard on for many years, and I started both these projects to help me with that task. Of course, I hope they’re useful sites in their own right too!
I also hope this is a good reminder that you may look at someone else’s project and think it’s growing organically. In fact, it’s probably powered by constant work, like the emails I send every day. It takes effort to keep people aware of what you’re doing, and most of it happens quietly behind the scenes.
You may know that I usually take a one week break over the holidays, but as I mentioned last Friday this year is a little different and you're getting an email.
However there's no news articles, no code links, no sponsor, no business or design sections, and no "And Finally…". Wait... Actually, there is an "And Finally…", in fact this issue is all about "And Finally…". 🎉
The most popular link in this newsletter is almost always the "And Finally…". I remember talking to someone in traditional email marketing at a conference once and they nearly fell over when I told them that the very last content link at the bottom of a long email was consistently the one with the highest number of clicks! 😂
So it's the most popular bit of the newsletter, but it hasn't always been there. The first appearance of it was in Issue 8 and the honour of that first one went to Brent Simmons.
I do remember why I started adding it to the end of each issue though. While iOS development links are interesting, they can sometimes be a little dry. Of course the primary purpose of this newsletter is to educate, but I do remember thinking that it would also need to be occasionally entertaining if it were to become popular.
During my childhood, there was a show on local TV called Granada Reports. It was a regional news programme which could also be a little dry, so they always ended with a lighthearted item to brighten up the end of the show. They would introduce the segment by starting the first sentence of the story with "And finally…" and it was a well loved feature of the show (a dramatisation of this segment even appeared in a movie). 😂
That was the idea behind adding the "And Finally…" link to the end of each issue of this newsletter. It was intended to be something to either make you smile or give you something entertaining to read in addition to the more serious content.
So, today's newsletter is a tribute to my favourite "And Finally…" links from 2018. Happy New Year everyone, and let me know if you enjoyed this issue and I'll maybe do it again next year. 👍
The dust is settling on this 2FA change that I mentioned last week. So, now that everything is a little clearer here's a quick summary of what you need to be aware of:
I've had 2FA on my personal iCloud account for years now but I just went through and enabled it for my developer accounts (Yes, more than one and yes, it's a long and dull story 😂). I followed these instructions from Apple and they worked perfectly. The only thing I did differently was that instead of signing out of my main iCloud account on my phone, I used a new local user account on my Mac to do the initial 2FA set up on my developer accounts.
Finally, if there truly is some genuine reason you are unable to switch this on for your Team Agent account, there is a section titled "What if I can’t enable two-factor authentication for some other reason?" at the bottom of this article. I don't have any information about this at all, and I'd expect a tough conversation to get it done, but it sounds Apple may be able to relax the restriction on an account by account basis.
The new rule kicks in next Wednesday so make sure you're ready. 👍