The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #33
New Xcode releases, zoom gestures in SwiftUI, smarter project organization, and a breakthrough for Simulator testing
🆕 What’s New
Hello Developer: November 2025
Catch the new design in the wild, and let Apple experts show you how to quickly and easily bring it to your apps. Plus, get the latest on the Swift Student Challenge 2026, and check out new developer videos available on demand.
Apple launched a new monthly series, covering everything from highlights of the Server-Side Swift conference to fresh Swift Evolution proposals. This October edition by Joe Heck dives into performance improvements, observability tools, and major package updates, including Swift Configuration and Swift Collections.
Apple released Xcode 26.1 and 26.2 beta this week. Xcode 26.1 ships with Swift 6.2.1 and brings fixes for background indexing, previews with mergeable libraries, and better stability in Instruments and Coding Assistant. The 26.2 beta moves to Swift 6.2.3 and improves memory safety tooling.
📚 Must Read
Understanding Task and Task.detached in Swift concurrency
Many developers still mix up when to use Task versus Task.detached. This article clearly shows that regular Task inherits context: actor isolation, priority, and cancellation, while Task.detached runs fully independent.
A deep dive into Collections, Sequences, and Iterators in Swift
A fantastic deep dive into how iteration actually works in Swift, from Sequence and Collection to custom iterators and async sequences. It shows what happens under the hood when you write for item in list, why most iterators are structs, and how to safely handle mutations during iteration. A must-read!
Zooming With The Magnify Gesture in SwiftUI
This post walks through implementing pinch-to-zoom in SwiftUI using the new MagnifyGesture API introduced in iOS 17. A great hands-on guide if you want to add smooth, native zoom interactions to your SwiftUI views.
🛠️ Toolbox
Simulator Camera: Test your app without a physical device
Antoine van der Lee just made something every iOS developer has wished for a reality - camera testing in the Simulator. His latest RocketSim update introduces Simulator Camera, streaming your Mac’s (or even iPhone’s) camera straight into Xcode’s Simulator with zero code changes. It works out of the box with AVCaptureSession, letting you test barcode scanning, Vision, or AR features without a physical device. Finally!
🍬 One More Thing…
Organize your targets with metadata tags
Metadata tags in Tuist completely change how large Xcode projects are organized. Instead of rigid folder structures, you can tag modules by feature, layer, team, or platform, and then generate focused workspaces or cache builds based on those tags. It’s a smarter, multi-dimensional way to manage modular apps and speed up builds without sacrificing clarity.
🗳️ Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
If you need to build apps for both iOS and Android, which approach would you choose?
Top Answer: Native UIs with shared logic
🗓 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 🍏