The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #31
New iOS beta, smarter SwiftUI patterns, and OpenAI steps into the browser game
🆕 What’s New
iOS 26.1 beta 4 brings a new option to disable the lock screen Camera shortcut and adds a toggle for the Liquid Glass tint effect. Small tweaks, but I like it. And as always, the main highlight of any update is improved stability.
OpenAI has officially launched ChatGPT Atlas, a new AI-powered browser now available for Mac. It deeply integrates ChatGPT, offering features such as Agent Mode, which can browse and manage tabs on your behalf, as well as shared memory between chats and browsing sessions. Windows, iOS, and Android versions are coming soon, but the real story here is how seamlessly AI is starting to blend into our daily web use.
📚 Must Read
SwiftUI Architecture: Structure Views for Reusability and Clarity
A great guide on making SwiftUI code more maintainable as projects grow. It shows how to break large view bodies into smaller components, extract shared styling into modifiers, and build generic helpers.
Singletons with Swift Concurrency
Singletons and Swift Concurrency don’t mix well because they’re global, non-Sendable state. This article walks through practical options: mark as unchecked Sendable if it’s already thread-safe, prefer MainActor for most cases, be cautious with actors and locks unless you accept the trade-offs. Short guidance for Swift 6 migrations, worth a full read.
A practical reminder to switch from plain String to LocalizedStringKey when building SwiftUI apps. It ensures your text is picked up by String Catalogs and supports Xcode’s new on-device comment generation. It also shows how modern tools make full-app localization surprisingly achievable, from AI-assisted translations to automated paywall updates.
🛠️ Toolbox
Speed up your builds with the remote Tuist cache for Xcode
Tuist rolled out a remote cache that plugs into Xcode 26’s new compilation cache, letting teams reuse build artifacts across local and CI. Their benchmarks show big wins, from ~20-36% on real apps to 50%+ on Tuist CLI, with the largest gains when dependencies are generated as Xcode projects instead of pure SPM.
🍬 One More Thing…
Transforming Glass Views with the glassEffectID
A great deep dive into the new glassEffectID modifier in SwiftUI. It shows how Liquid Glass lets you morph one view into another within a shared container, no complex transitions needed.
🗳️ Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
How often do you buy a new Mac?
Top Answer: Only when it completely dies
🗓 Upcoming Conferences
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Jun
3–4 — MDevCamp 2026 (Prague 🇨🇿)
👋 That’s it for this week
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Until next Friday — keep shipping 🍏