It’s that time of year again! Apple is hosting their now-usual one-day event, but I’m sure there will be community events popping up all over to complement it. I wish you luck if you’ve applied for a ticket!

The announcement of WWDC always prompts wishlists for enhancements to Apple’s operating systems, and this year I have one feature that I hope Apple has been working on.

I’d love a system-level API that allows developers to categorise their push notifications before, because guideline 4.5.4 isn’t working. Specifically this:

Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app's UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

Yes, yes. I know there’s a difference between “should not” and “must not”, but it’s clear that this particular “should not” isn’t pulling its weight from a glance at the lock screen of most people’s phones.

I believe a good first step to solving this problem could be fairly simple, and wouldn’t take teams of people vetting messages. Apple should provide an API to let developers categorise their push notifications. That’s it! That’s the whole idea. 👍

I’m not sure you even need more than two categories, either. Maybe “essential” and “marketing”. Then, add the ability to control pushes for each category in Settings and let the user see how the app has categorised each message as they view it.

Would some apps abuse a system like this and claim everything was an essential notification? Sure they would, but even if they did we’d be no worse off than we are today. I believe most developers would act responsibly, though. The App Store Guideline could become “Push Notifications must be categorised …” and I think it would solve a significant amount of push notification spam.

There’s one final problem¹ with what I’m suggesting. How do you ensure developers don’t just ignore this as they send pushes? I’d give apps a (lengthy) period of adjustment, then set a date and say any uncategorised push after that date won’t get delivered. That should be effective persuasion for people to add the parameter.

I’m probably being horribly optimistic about how well this would work, but if I’m wrong and it needs more than what I proposed here, at least we’d be on the way to a better solution.

Are you going to make me happy in June, Apple? 🤞

¹ Who am I kidding? Apple will have needed to figure out hundreds more problems if they have been working on something along these lines, but I only have a few paragraphs here!

Dave Verwer  

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secureframe.com  

Dark Patterns are now illegal in India

I can’t easily find whether this became law in India, but I did find the draft guidelines from October last year. I also found another article talking about similar legislation in the EU and California, which has already resulted in a $245,000,000 fine to Epic Games. These cases are sure to hit the App Store, too, as so many apps are rife with these dark patterns. I hope we see more of this kind of legislation.

uxdesign.cc  

Customising the DocC documentation themes

Did you know you could customise the theme for your DocC documentation and that it would work both in the Xcode viewer and on your documentation generated for the web? No? Then I’ll assume you also didn’t know that if you host documentation for a Swift package, that Swift Package Index also supports these themes!

swiftpackageindex.com  

Recreating Apple's beautiful visionOS search bar

Christian Selig dives back into UIkit on visionOS to match the look and feel of Apple’s visionOS search bars. I’m sure that SwiftUI will get updates to make this easier, but I love to see apps sweating the details and going above and beyond saying “That’ll do”. 👍

christianselig.com  

Make Your iOS App Smaller with Dynamic Frameworks

I’m not one to obsess over saving every byte in an app bundle, but this technique from Jacob Bartlett is worth doing if you have any significant asset bundles or other resources you use from extensions as well as your main app.

emergetools.com  

Swift Isolation Intuition

There was a trio of Swift concurrency posts this week and since it’s such a hot topic at the moment, you get all three here. First up, and the link above, is Matt Massicotte on isolation. Next is Joannis Orlandos on shared mutable state, and finally SwiftUI Views and MainActor from fatbobman. Enjoy!

massicotte.org  

Writing GNOME Apps with Swift

Is 2024 going to be the year of Linux on the desktop? Maybe if we all start writing apps in Swift for GNOME it could be! david-swift is here to show us how.

swift.org  

iOS Engineer @ trivago – trivago, a metasearch engine using real-time auction and petabytes of data, enables millions of travelers compare hotel prices from hundreds of booking sites. Based in Düsseldorf, we foster a culture of learning and innovation, embracing flexibility for our talents to shape the travel industry. – On-site (Germany) with some remote work (Anywhere)

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