The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #24
The future of iOS design, debugging with actors, and making sense of ViewBuilder
🆕 What’s New
Hello Developer - September 2025
Apple has launched the September edition of Hello Developer, and this one is all about design. Liquid Glass, new Icon Composer, and refreshed UI kits for Figma. You can also rewatch Cupertino sessions and book 1:1 time with Apple experts.
My tip: don’t just skim the design docs, try out the kits and see how they reshape your current project.
📚 Must Read
Debugging Swift Concurrency
This article clears up one of the biggest confusions when moving to Swift 6 concurrency: it’s no longer about checking threads, it’s about checking actors. Forget Thread.isMainThread, now you should rely on MainActor.assertIsolated and similar tools to confirm your UI updates happen in the right place. A must-read if you want to avoid race conditions and debug async Swift code the modern way.
Building a design system at Genius Scan
As your app grows, maintaining a consistent UI becomes a constant battle: duplicated margins, messy rows, and arbitrary numbers everywhere. This article demonstrates how to transform that chaos into a clean, reusable design system without rewriting your entire app. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to start building one, this might be the inspiration you need.
ViewBuilder usage explained with code examples
ViewBuilder is everywhere in SwiftUI, but most of us rarely stop to think about what it really does. Antoine van der Lee breaks it down with clear examples, showing how it powers body, how to use it in initializers, properties, and custom methods.
🛠️ Toolbox
xcbeautify
This week’s pick is xcbeautify, a fast Swift-based alternative to xcpretty. It makes your xcodebuild and swift test logs actually readable, with clean colors, JUnit reports, and even GitHub integration. If you’re tired of wading through noisy CI output to spot one failing test, give this a try.
🍬 One More Thing…
Design as brand: The power of choice and belief
Design isn’t just about usability, it’s about values. This piece explores how every detail in your app, from the icon to the loading screen, becomes part of your brand’s voice. The strongest apps today don’t try to please everyone. They resonate deeply by standing for something. A powerful read if you want to rethink how design can transform your product into a statement.
🗳️ Weekly Poll
🗓 Upcoming Conferences
September
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
December
🆕 13–15 — Mobile Developers Week Abu Dhabi 2025 (Abu Dhabi 🇦🇪)
👋 That’s it for this week
If you enjoyed this issue of The iOS Weekly Brief, consider forwarding it to a colleague!
Until next Friday — keep shipping 🍏