This week I’ve been thinking about...
I found that when working with AI, the most important factors are the amount of context and the ability to manage it. In this issue there is an article about using tokens efficiently, and it’s not only about the cost of your request. If you provide the AI with only the information it needs to carry out the task, everything works more clearly.
You should always think about the context and start a new session when carrying out a new task, and keep your skills and AGENTS.md files neat and well organised.
What’s New
Three New Apple Smart Home Products Coming on October 13
Apple will show a home hub, a new HomePod mini, and a new Apple TV, all built around Siri AI.
I have a few HomePods and an Apple TV, and I love how well they fit into the Apple ecosystem. But if the AI features are limited to just Siri AI, I’m not sure it’s worth upgrading. I’d love to install AI apps on them, like Meta’s Muse, and turn that small box next to my TV into my personal assistant. But yeah, will see...
Releases
Must Read
Letting AI See SwiftUI: Xcode Preview MCP in Practice
It’s really important to give AI context about the result of its work. For a mobile app, the result is how it looks, and the simplest way to show that is to give the agent access to Previews.
Xcode already lets agents render Previews through MCP, but the process still has a list of problems. Check out the article to see what exactly can go wrong and how to work around it.
How to reduce token usage in Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor
Saving tokens isn’t only about spending less money. It’s also about how much information you keep in the context, and how much of it the agent needs to do its job. The more useful information gets into the context, the better the agent works.
That’s why it’s important to understand how to use tokens more efficiently. This article goes through the key points that matter for iOS developers.
Swift’s New if let Syntax - Cleaner Optional Unwrapping
I always follow how Apple updates Swift and simplifies its syntax, I really love it. I often share these updates as small comments during code review, it’s a nice way to share knowledge with the team. I like clean code, and Swift is a pretty clean language, so every bit of syntactic sugar is a pure pleasure.
I think most of you already know about if let user, but I still see the old if let user = user a lot in code reviews. So, just FYI 😉
Quick Read
Adjusting the hinge angle in the iPhone Duo simulator
In Xcode 27.1, hold the Option (⌥) key while the iPhone Duo simulator is focused, and a hidden slider appears that lets you set any hinge angle
Video
Xcode 27 Now Has a Markdown Editor
It’s great that Xcode now has a formatting bar with headings, strikethrough, links, lists, and more. In the AI era, we work with markdown files a lot, and I always had the question of which tool is the best for it. Now that Xcode fully supports markdown, I can keep working in my main tool without switching to anything else.
Toolbox
I came across this service by accident recently, and I find it really cool and useful. They added a new tab just for iPhone Duo, where you can play with SwiftUI layouts right on the page. It supports different orientations and hinge states: closed, partially open, and fully open.
I recommend everyone check it out and play with it, it might be useful for your needs too.
iOS Job Market (USA)
81 new iOS positions this week (-12% vs last week · -46% vs last month)
Senior / Mid / Junior — 51% / 49% / 0%
Most wanted skills: SwiftUI 53% · MVVM 36% · UIKit 35% · Combine 31%
This week’s picks:
Senior iOS Engineer at Citizen (New York, NY) — Owns the native iOS app behind the #1 safety app in the U.S., built on a TCA codebase with Swift Package Manager and Fastlane, streaming live incident video and alerts to millions of users in real time → Apply
iOS Engineer at Atlys (United States) — Builds Atlys’s AI-first visa app in Swift, SwiftUI, TCA and Swift Concurrency, bringing AI-powered flows like smart document scanning into the visa journey for 1M+ travelers across 127 countries → Apply
Staff iOS Engineer at FOX Direct to Consumer (New York, NY) — Sets iOS and tvOS architecture across FOX’s streaming brands (FOX News, FOX Sports, Tubi), combining SwiftUI, MVVM, Swift Concurrency and XCTest while using agentic workflows to ship at speed for an audience of millions → Apply
Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
Have you run your app on the iPhone Duo Simulator?
Top Answer: No, not yet
Upcoming Conferences
October
7–9 — Next.App DevCon 2026 (Berlin 🇩🇪)
12–14 — SwiftLeeds 2026 (Leeds 🇬🇧)
November
2–3 — Swift Connection (Paris 🇫🇷)
10–12 — Do iOS 2026 (Amsterdam 🇳🇱)
19–20 — Swift Bharat (Mumbai 🇮🇳)
20–22 — SwiftSonic 26 (Nashville 🇺🇸)
February 2027
16–18 — ARCTIC Conference (Oulu 🇫🇮)
March 2027
2–4 — try! Swift Tokyo 2027 (Tokyo 🇯🇵)
16–18 — Appdevcon 2027 (Amsterdam 🇳🇱)
September 2027