🆕 What’s New
Announcing the Swift SDK for Android
Swift just took a huge step toward true cross-platform development. The new Swift SDK for Android is now available in nightly previews, letting you write and run Swift code natively on Android. It’s not a hack or wrapper; it’s real interoperability with Java through the swift-java project, allowing you to share business logic across iOS and Android without rewriting it.
This is the kind of milestone that could finally make “Swift everywhere” more than a slogan. The official Getting Started guide and examples are already live 🎉
Enhancements to help you submit and market your apps and games
Apple just gave App Store marketing a serious upgrade. Developers can now submit new content like In-App Events even while an app is under review. You also get up to 70 custom product pages (yes, Apple has doubled the limit) and can assign keywords to each, finally letting those pages appear directly in search results.
📚 Must Read
Cross-Platform vs AI: The Changing Economics of Mobile Development
A sharp take on the new balance between cross-platform and native. The author argues that AI is quietly killing the main reason cross-platform existed in the first place - cost, and I 100% agree with him. With tools like Swift for Android and AI-assisted coding, native is becoming faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain.
Build performance analysis for speeding up Xcode builds
In this post, Antoine breaks down how to analyze and speed up builds using the Build Timeline, Timing Summary, and smarter script configuration.
The author shows how easy it is to create mismatched defaults or mistyped keys when using AppStorage across multiple views, and then solves it elegantly with a typed AppStorageKey extension.
Liquid Glass: Redefining design through Hierarchy, Harmony, and Consistency
I think this piece is worth reading because it captures Apple’s biggest design shift in years. Liquid Glass isn’t just about blur effects or gradients, it redefines how interfaces behave. The focus on hierarchy, harmony, and consistency makes iOS 26 feel more alive and content-driven than ever.
🛠️ Toolbox
If you’ve ever broken a branch mid-rebase, this guide is a goldmine. It walks through practical git rebase habits, from keeping merge bubbles for context, to verifying results with range-diff, to safely pushing with --force-with-lease.
I like how it demystifies the messy parts of rebasing without pretending it’s foolproof. It’s the kind of hands-on advice that actually makes you less afraid to hit rebase --interactive next time.
🍬 One More Thing…
Building Native Android Apps with Swift
This conversation shows what real Swift-on-Android development looks like today. Pierluigi shares how his team uses the Skip toolchain to run Swift business logic on Android while keeping native UIs, why they chose Swift over Kotlin Multiplatform, and what trade-offs they faced along the way. It’s a thoughtful, hands-on perspective on where cross-platform Swift is heading next.
🗳️ Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
Do you already use String Catalogs in your projects?
Top Answer: Yes, I’ve switched to them
🗓 Upcoming Conferences
November
3-28 — Meet with Apple (Global 🌎)
December
13–15 — Mobile Developers Week Abu Dhabi 2025 (Abu Dhabi 🇦🇪)
January
21–23 — iOS Conf SG (Singapore 🇸🇬)
February
10–12 — Arctic Conference (Oulu 🇫🇮)
March
April
12–14 — Try! Swift Tokyo 2026 (Tokyo 🇯🇵)
12–14 — Deep Dish Swift (Chicago 🇺🇸)
👋 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 🍏
Cross-platform reality check: we’ll see who actually ships production apps with Swift for Android — if anyone does before 2026. The cultural barrier is real. iOS teams rejected Kotlin in shared layers, and Android teams won’t jump on Swift just because iOS developers want them to. Toolchain maturity matters, and SFA still isn't plug-and-play for real business logic.
If a team wants cross-platform logic, step one isn’t rewriting code — it’s building a test suite specification for the shared domain layer and applying it on both platforms for tests.
Curious to see whether Apple's own Android apps become the real SFA showcase:
- Apple Music
- Apple Music Classical
- Move to iOS
- Tracker Detect