The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #48
Apple Experience on March 4, iOS 26.4 betas are out, agentic delivery pipelines, SwiftUI toast above everything, CLI tools over MCP servers, and tracking your Claude Agent from the menu bar.
🆕 What’s New
Apple is hosting a special “Apple Experience” event on March 4 in New York, London, and Shanghai. It’s not a traditional keynote, so don’t expect a live stream. Instead, selected journalists get hands-on time with whatever Apple announces.
Get ready with the latest beta releases
Apple released the first betas of iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, macOS 26.4, tvOS 26.4, visionOS 26.4, and watchOS 26.4. Time to fire up your test devices and check if your apps still behave as expected 🚀
📚 Must Read
Setting up a delivery pipeline for your agentic iOS projects
Donny Wals wrote about his CI/CD setup for agentic projects, and the gym story at the start is exactly what good agentic workflow looks like in practice. The agents.md as a living document piece is something I keep coming back to, you add rules every time the agent does something you don't want. The quality of your output is only as good as the guardrails you put in place upfront.
Building a SwiftUI Toast in 5 Steps
Toasts are more of an Android thing, but the approach here is solid. A temporary UIWindow placed above the app's main window is the right way to do it if you want the notification to appear above sheets, tab bars, and navigation. The PassThroughWindow implementation with Liquid Glass detection is a nice touch for iOS 26.
Don’t Build MCPs, Build CLI Tools
MCP was designed for sandboxed agents without terminal access. If you're using Claude Code, your agent already has a terminal and doesn't need the extra layer. We don't use MCP servers on our end either, and context window bloat is a big part of why. The argument for CLI tools, zero schema overhead, native composability with pipes, no server setup, is hard to ignore.
🛠️ Toolbox
A macOS menu bar app that tracks your Claude Agent activity from Xcode: messages, sessions, tool calls, token counts, peak hours. Small tool, but useful if you want to keep an eye on how much your agent is actually doing.
🍬 One More Thing…
Paul Hudson is doing a live stream on February 21 covering exactly what a lot of us are figuring out right now: agentic coding in Xcode 26.3, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and the instructions and skills that keep AI on track.
🗳️ Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
What’s your main AI coding setup for iOS development?
Top Answer: Xcode to build + external to edit
🗓 Upcoming Conferences
February
24–27 — Meet with Apple (Global 🌎)
March
April
12–14 — Try! Swift Tokyo 2026 (Tokyo 🇯🇵)
12–14 — Deep Dish Swift (Chicago 🇺🇸)
May
18–20 — Swift Craft 2026 (Folkestone 🇬🇧)
19–21 — MAU Vegas 2026 (Las Vegas 🇺🇸)
June
3–4 — MDevCamp 2026 (Prague 🇨🇿)
July
7–10 — MacAdmins Conference (State College 🇺🇸)
22–23 — Swift Rockies 2026 (Calgary 🇨🇦)
September
7–11 — Swift Island 2026 (Texel 🇳🇱)
October
7–9 — Next.App DevCon 2026 (Berlin 🇩🇪)
12–14 — SwiftLeeds 2026 (Leeds 🇬🇧)
November
20–22 — SwiftSonic 26 (Nashville 🇺🇸)
👋 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 🍏