The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #41
Apple’s long-term AI bet, agentic workflows, date decoding strategies, cleaner package setups, and a practical look at closing the loop with AI in real iOS development
🆕 What’s New
Report: Apple’s AI Strategy Could Finally Pay Off in 2026
Apple’s cautious AI strategy might finally make sense. While others burn billions on proprietary models, Apple is fine treating LLMs as a commodity, using third-party models like Gemini and shipping AI through iPhone-level OS integration. It feels strange for a company that used to lead the industry, and the AI race looks lost for now, but maybe the bubble is making all of us miss the real play.
📚 Must Read
Using Windsurf Workflows to Automate the Software Development Lifecycle
In this article, I explain why real AI productivity starts not with prompts, but with structured workflows. I demonstrate how Windsurf Workflows can standardize everyday engineering tasks, why context management becomes critical at scale, and how the Agent Skills pattern from Claude helps keep AI focused on reasoning rather than glue code. If you’re experimenting with AI beyond autocomplete and want something that actually works in production, this one is worth your time.
Understanding date decoding strategies when working with JSON in Swift
Dates are where JSON decoding in Swift quietly breaks in real projects, and this article does a great job explaining why. It walks through all date decoding strategies in JSONDecoder, from timestamps and ISO 8601 to custom fallback logic when APIs are inconsistent.
This is a sharp take on a trend that looks clever but usually isn’t. Matt explains why versioned Package.swift files make sense only when you truly need newer manifest APIs, and why using them to bump the tools version adds complexity with zero upside.
🛠️ Toolbox
Asset Catalog Viewer is a small but very practical VSCode add-on for anyone who touches .xcassets outside Xcode. It brings the familiar three-panel asset catalog UI into VSCode, with previews, properties, and support for image sets, colors, app icons, and data assets, including @1x/@2x/@3x and device-specific variants.
🍬 One More Thing…
Closing the Loop on iOS with Claude Code
This post is a great reminder that agentic coding only becomes useful when the agent can actually see the results of its work. It walks through a practical “closed loop” for iOS: build with cache intact, install and launch on the simulator, read logs, and even poke the UI, with a bonus step for running on real devices when the simulator lies. If you’re experimenting with Claude Code and keep getting stuck at “looks good in theory,” this is the missing piece.
🗳️ Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
What tool do you use for project documentation?
Top Answer: Notion
🗓 Upcoming Conferences
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 🇺🇸)
May
19–21 — MAU Vegas 2026 (Las Vegas 🇺🇸)
June
3–4 — MDevCamp 2026 (Prague 🇨🇿)
October
7–9 — Next.App DevCon 2026 (Berlin 🇩🇪)
👋 That’s it for this week
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Until next Friday — keep shipping 🍏