The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #70
Claude now runs your app in the iOS Simulator, Apple's Foundation Models and testing them properly, adaptive non-modal panels and widgets in SwiftUI, a tool that keeps your AI agent up to date on WWDC
This week I’ve been thinking about...
I keep hearing debates about which model is the best, but I don’t think it matters here. It is important where that model lives and how easy it is to use. Let’s take a look at Gemini, I don’t like it as a model, it doesn’t fit my workflow the way Claude or GPT does. But Gemini is in every Google tool, and it changes the whole picture. I think Anthropic’s decision with the iOS Simulator support was a great idea. It definitely lowers the first step for someone who wants to try building an app.
One of our product managers used Claude to create a prototype and show it running on the web. Setting up Xcode, installing simulators, wiring up a project, none of that is trivial if you have never done it. Now you can just ask Claude to draw an iPhone screen and show you how it looks. This tells me the demand for fast prototyping is real, and it comes from product people, not developers. You don’t need a designer or an engineer to test an idea, you can just look at it yourself. If it feels right, you move it into the professional lane, hand it to people who design and architect the thing properly, and build it for real.
I’d put this feature in the hands of non-developers more than developers. It’s a great tool for someone who never wrote a line of code and wants to see their idea come to life.
On the downside, lowering the barrier means more slop in the App Store. But to be fair, people who wanted to ship an app had every tool they needed for that already, Claude, MCP, etc. Writing the code was never the hard part, and real software engineers don’t get paid for typing code. There’s a lot more to shipping software than that, and none of it goes away just because building a prototype got easier.
It’s probably still rough around the edges today, but I like where this is heading. I can imagine a Zoom call where someone throws out an idea, we write a few prompts, and a prototype shows up right there while we’re still talking, no Figma file, nothing prebuilt. Then we take that prototype, write the spec from it, figure out the architecture, connect a backend, and ship the real feature.
What’s New
Claude Code Can Now Build and Test iOS Apps in Apple’s Simulator
Anthropic released a public beta that has an integration with iOS Simulator. Now Claude Desktop can build, launch and tests your app right there, with a live panel showing the simulator.
The test loop got a lot simpler with this change, I see real value here for quick prototyping, testing an idea fast and showing it to someone. I don’t see this as a professional tool yet though... For real production work I’d use an MCP to have the right level of control.
Releases
Must Read
Getting Started with Apple’s Foundation Models
This is not the first article covering Foundation Models, but I found it really easy to follow. If you have not started digging into this yet, I recommend checking it out. Adding an AI feature to your app has never been this simple before.
If you already went through the first article and got familiar with Foundation Models, this is a good next step to extend what you can do with it. Apple published a separate open-source package on top of the framework that connects your session to hosted models through the Chat Completions protocol, gives you a few strategies to manage the context window as your session grows, and lets you load instructions only when the model needs them through runtime skills.
Building adaptive non-modal panels in SwiftUI
I’m not a big fan of custom solutions, but sometimes Apple’s component just does not match how you want the feature to behave. Bottom sheets are a good example, in every app I’ve worked on we wanted them to behave differently than Apple intended. It’s great to see this built with SwiftUI, no third party library, custom layout, custom drag handling, adaptive positioning across rotation, all from scratch, amazing work!
Building widgets with WidgetKit and SwiftUI
I don’t use widgets that often myself, but every app should have one if it makes sense for the product. A widget is another entry point into your app, sitting right there on the home screen next to your app icon. If it fits your use case, this is a good place to start.
Geometry, compositing and drawing groups in SwiftUI
geometryGroup(), compositingGroup(), drawingGroup(), three modifiers with a similar name, but very different jobs. Let’s read the article to understand where and when you need to use all of them.
Quick Read
SwiftUI Text Selection Improvements in iOS 27
Text(""" SwiftUI makes it easy to build beautiful apps across Apple platforms. """) // on iOS 27 this now gives you native range selection, no code changes needed .textSelection(.enabled)
Video
Evaluating Apple Intelligence Features in Xcode
Don’t forget that shipping an AI feature also means testing it, and this video walks through how to do that in the right way, using a new Evaluations framework in Xcode 27.
Toolbox
If you don't have time to sit through every WWDC session but want your AI agent to know what was announced, this tool is for you. It feeds your agent all the content it needs from every WWDC 2026 session, so it stays up to date with the latest changes Apple presented.
iOS Job Market (USA)
29 new iOS positions this week (-12% vs last week · -19% vs last month)
Senior / Mid / Junior — 41% / 59% / 0%
Most wanted skills: SwiftUI 52% · UIKit 28% · Combine 21% · MVVM 14%
This week’s picks:
Software Engineer, iOS at Current (New York, NY) — Swift Concurrency model (required), UIKit for native layouts, gRPC/Protobuf for networking; 6M+ members managing their finances. $150K–$200K → Apply
Software Sr Engineer, iOS at RSA Security (Remote) — Swift + SwiftUI/UIKit, MVVM/Clean Architecture, Apple Security framework + CryptoKit + Keychain API; building RSA SecurID mobile authentication for 12,000 organizations and 25M enterprise identities. $100K–$140K → Apply
Sr Engineer, iOS at Target (Brooklyn Park, MN) — SwiftUI + TCA architecture powering the Target app; major iOS engineering investment at one of the US's largest retailers, millions of daily users → Apply
Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
What’s your experience with iOS 27 so far?
Top Answer: Installed the beta, loving it
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