The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #19
Beta season, SwiftUI performance tricks, async Observations, AI-powered dev workflows, and why vibecoding isn’t a hiring red flag anymore.
🆕 What’s New
iOS 26 Public Beta is now available
Apple just released the iOS 26 Public Beta, and it’s already feeling more stable than the early dev builds. With polished Liquid Glass effects, Dynamic wallpapers, and smarter Call Screening, it’s a fun one to explore. Most geeks (myself included) are already installing it, just remember, it’s still beta, so a few bugs may pop up.
📚 Must Read
Understanding and Improving SwiftUI Performance
SwiftUI makes building UIs fast, but at scale it can introduce sneaky performance issues. Airbnb shares how they reduced re-renders by 15% using a custom Equatable macro, view decomposition, and even a SwiftLint rule to track view complexity. A must-read for anyone building SwiftUI in large teams.
Streaming changes with Observations
Swift’s new Observations type brings reactive power to the async world, no more hacking around withObservationTracking. Now you can turn observable state into an AsyncSequence and use it directly in for await loops.
Combine and Swift Concurrency: A threading risk
When mixing Combine with MainActor isolation in Swift 6.2, you might face crashes due to unexpected threading behavior, and the compiler won’t warn you. Antoine explains why migrating to Swift Concurrency’s native async APIs is safer and how to spot this subtle pitfall before it hits production.
Why Your Company Should Embrace AI, But Be Wary of Vibe-Coding
Ronnie breaks down 4 phases of AI adoption in his iOS team, from basic prompting to using AI as a codebase archaeologist, unit test generator, and context-aware reviewer. The message is clear: AI is your co-pilot, not your autopilot. You still need to understand every line you ship.
If your team is experimenting with LLMs or planning to, this piece is packed with practical lessons and clear thinking worth sharing.
🛠️ Toolbox
Foundation Models - Building an AI Chatbot in SwiftUI
Apple’s new Foundation Models framework finally lets us run real AI apps entirely on-device. This demo shows how to build a chatbot that remembers context, responds in real time, and uses tool calling to enhance answers. A great example of what’s now possible without hitting the network.
🍬 One More Thing…
Meta Is Going to Let Job Candidates Use AI During Coding Tests
Meta will start letting some job candidates use AI assistants during coding tests, calling it a more realistic reflection of how engineers work today. Mark Zuckerberg says AI “mid-level coders” are coming fast, and the next wave of devs may be managing agents, not writing code line-by-line. Welcome to the era of vibecoding.
🗳️ Weekly Poll
🗓 Upcoming Conferences
August
30-31 — iPlayground (Taipei 🇹🇼)
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 🍏