The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #65
iOS 27 prepares for the foldable era, AsyncImage finally gets native caching, SwiftData gains ResultsObserver, and the AI world had a dramatic week.
This week we have fewer big announcements, more tutorials. That’s always what happens after WWDC: devs start digging into the new APIs and sharing what they find. Most of what you will read this issue requires iOS 27, which means you can explore it now but probably won’t ship it for a while 😬
A couple of AI stories this week that are not directly about iOS but feel relevant to us as developers.
The US government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to the latest model. I find this situation a bit odd… Anthropic itself pointed out that the capability the government was concerned about is already present in other publicly available models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. Which makes you wonder why Anthropic specifically was targeted. Having a government actively move against you is not a great position to be in. More importantly, this is a reminder that depending on a single AI provider is a real risk. If this can happen to Anthropic, it can happen to others too.
SpaceX acquired Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal 🤯 That is a wild number for what is essentially an AI-powered code editor. Cursor’s market share had actually been declining before the deal. So the price feels hard to justify on fundamentals alone. SpaceX already merged with xAI earlier, and now with Grok and Cursor under the same roof, there is clearly a bigger play here around AI development tooling.
This issue ended up longer than I planned, but I tried to pick only the things that I found most useful, enjoy 😊
What’s New
iOS 27 Adds Landscape Mode to More Apple Apps Ahead of iPhone Ultra
iOS 27 brings landscape support to most of Apple's standard apps, with Messages also getting a collapsible sidebar in landscape mode. This looks like groundwork for the rumored "iPhone Ultra", and it is basically iOS catching up to what Android has supported for years. Funny enough, landscape home screen support already existed back on the old Plus models.
New domain for Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email
Apple is unifying the email domains for Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under one shared domain, private.icloud.com, later this summer, while old addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com and icloud.com keep working as before. If you have any email validation, allowlists, or domain based filtering in your app, this is a good time to add the new domain before it shows up in production.
Releases
Must Read
From Size Class to Available Space: Is horizontalSizeClass Still Reliable?
Fatbobman covers one of the quieter but important changes from WWDC 26: with iPhone apps now running in resizable windows, horizontalSizeClass is no longer a reliable signal for layout width. Geometry-based layout is the new direction, though honestly it can feel like a workaround compared to size class which was just simpler. With resizable windows coming to iPhone, the old approach is starting to show its limits…
AsyncImage finally gets native caching in iOS 27, and I could not be happier about this. Without caching, AsyncImage was never really an option for production apps, so most of us just kept using Kingfisher. Now you can customize cache policy through URLRequest or plug in a custom URLSession via the new asyncImageURLSession modifier, though that last part is still a bit buggy in Beta 1.
How did Apple cut launch time by 30% in iOS 27?
Jacob Bartlett does a solid deep-dive into one of the more interesting claims from this WWDC: Apple says iOS 27 improves app launch times by 30%
Actors in Swift: The Problem They Solve and How it Works
This is a proper deep dive into how Actors actually work under the hood. It covers actor isolation, serial executor, cross-actor references, and reentrancy, which is probably the trickiest part to get right. I think this is fundamental knowledge every iOS developer should have, because Actors are now one of the main tools for async code, and using them without really understanding the mechanics is a good way to end up with subtle bugs that are nearly impossible to debug.
withTaskCancellationShield in Swift 6.4
Swift 6.4 adds withTaskCancellationShield, a small but useful API for cleanup code that must run even when a task is cancelled. The rule is - shield cleanup, not business logic.
What’s New in SwiftData for iOS 27
iOS 27 brings a good set of SwiftData improvements: enum predicates, sectioned queries, compound predicates, and the new .codable attribute. But the one I am most excited about is ResultsObserver, which finally lets you observe store changes outside of SwiftUI views. I was never a fan of putting data storage logic at the view level, so this feels like a step in the right direction. The article covers all of these features in detail with code examples for each one, so if you are building anything with SwiftData, this is a good one to go through carefully.
Quick Read
Adaptive TabView Layouts with .tabViewStyle(.sidebarAdaptable) in SwiftUI
TabView {} // Enables adaptive behavior: tab bar on iPhone, sidebar on iPad .tabViewStyle(.sidebarAdaptable) // Prefer sidebar placement when the space allows .defaultTabBarPlacement(.sidebar)SwiftUI Best Practices, straight from Apple’s Xcode 27 Agent Skill
Video
App Store Optimization is BACK?!
Right around WWDC this week, indie developers started noticing their App Store rankings climbing. The theory is that Apple quietly updated their ranking algorithm. I noticed some unexpected spikes on my own projects too, so this does not feel like a coincidence 🤔
Toolbox
Using Claude with Apple Foundation Models
Apple extended the Foundation Models framework with support for server-side models, and Anthropic was quick to ship ClaudeForFoundationModels, a Swift package that makes Claude a drop-in replacement for LanguageModelSession. Same API, same @Generable macro, same streaming, just a different model underneath. What I really like about this approach is that third-party models feel and work like native ones, no separate SDK, no different patterns to learn.
iOS Job Market (USA)
48 new iOS positions this week (+55% vs last week · +78% vs last month)
Senior / Mid / Junior — 19% / 81% / 0%
Most wanted skills: SwiftUI 58% · UIKit 31% · MVVM 15% · Combine 10%
This week’s picks:
iOS App Development Engineer at Adobe (San Jose, CA) — TCA + Combine + MVVM + concurrency on Marc Levoy's Nextcam team, the group behind Project Indigo, an experimental AI camera app that mixes computational photography with on-device intelligence → Apply
iOS Engineer at Hinge (New York, NY) — SwiftUI and Swift Concurrency on a dating app used by millions; the listing explicitly calls out AI dev tools as part of day-to-day workflow, which is a good sign for how the team operates. $150K–$180K → Apply
Software Engineer, iOS/Mobile, Health Wearable at Beacon AI (San Carlos, CA) — SwiftUI + HealthKit + real-time biometric data visualization for flight crew safety monitoring; one of the more unusual iOS niches in this week's dataset, backed by DoD contracts and airline partnerships → Apply
Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
How do you feel about WWDC26?
Top Answer: Met expectations
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