The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #16
Beta tweaks, AI SwiftUI benchmarks, new macros, and concurrency tips
🆕 What’s New
Everything New in iOS 26 Beta 3
Apple’s iOS 26 Beta 3 brings a visual polish with more opaque nav bars, brighter Control Center toggles, and refined Safari folders, plus four new wallpaper shades and a shake-to-find iPad cursor. Offline Maps now warns about fog and delays, and the external-display sleep bug during video calls is fixed.
📚 Must Read
iOS LLM Arena: A Head-to-Head Benchmark for AI-Generated SwiftUI
Ronnie Rocha pits the biggest AI vision-capable models against each other in the “iOS LLM Arena,” turning real App Store screenshots into working SwiftUI code and scoring them on build success, cost, token efficiency, and visual fidelity. Google Gemini 2.5 Pro takes the crown for pixel-perfect UI and clean architecture, Claude Sonnet surprises with its quiz logic smarts, and open-source contenders show early promise. If you want to know which model deserves your iOS team’s API budget and see side-by-side code comparisons, this deep dive is a must-read.
Introducing Animatable macro in SwiftUI
Apple’s new Animatable macro in SwiftUI lets you ditch manual Animatable protocol boilerplate, annotate your view or shape, and watch all your VectorArithmetic properties animate smoothly, with optional AnimatableIgnored to skip anything you don’t want. The walkthrough shows how to convert your Ints to Floats, apply default animations, and fine-tune your transitions with almost zero extra code. If you’ve ever wrestled with custom SwiftUI animations, this guide is a game-changer. Check out the full post for practical examples and pro tips!
What is Approachable Concurrency in Xcode 26?
Xcode 26’s new SWIFT_APPROACHABLE_CONCURRENCY setting flips on a bundle of Swift 6.2 improvements nonisolated(nonsending) by default, inferred Sendable for functions and key paths, auto-isolated protocol conformances, smarter global‐actor handling, and disabled outward actor isolation. Hence, your async code runs on the calling executor, and the compiler stops flagging spurious data-race risks. If you’ve ever wrestled with odd Swift Concurrency quirks in Xcode, this deep dive is a must-read.
🛠️ Toolbox
Supporting sufficient contrast accessibility with Xcode's Color Contrast Calculator
Xcode’s Accessibility Inspector includes a Color Contrast Calculator that lets you pick or sample any foreground and background colors in your running app and instantly see their WCAG contrast ratio. It’s a one-stop, built-in tool for verifying that your text, icons, and UI elements meet accessibility guidelines, essential for designing apps that work for users with low vision.
🍬 One More Thing…
Vibe coding in Xcode 26: is it good?
This livestream deep-dives into Xcode 26’s new vibe-coding AI: you can turn a rough UI sketch into a working SwiftUI quiz app in under an hour, but you’ll still hit hallucinatory modifiers and miss the smooth code-review UX you get in tools like Cursor. If you want to see where Apple’s built-in AI shines and where it still needs guardrails, this video recap is a must-watch.
🗳️ Weekly Poll
🗓 Upcoming Conferences
September
2–4 — Swift Island (Texel 🇳🇱)
18-19 — NS Spain 2025 (Logroño 🇪🇸)
24–26 — FlutterCon Europe (Berlin 🇩🇪)
26-27 — Swift Bharat 2025 (Bengaluru 🇮🇳)
29–30 — Swift Connection (Paris 🇫🇷)
October
2–3 — ServerSide.swift (London 🇬🇧)
6–8 — SwiftLeeds (Leeds 🇬🇧)
24 — DevFest.cz (Prague 🇨🇿)
30–31 — Pragma Conference (Bologna 🇮🇹)
November
👋 That’s it for this week
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Until next Friday — keep shipping 🍏