Chef Marius Constantinescu cooked your goodies.

Week 400

Happy Thursday! This week it’s the 400th issue of this newsletter 🙌🎉🥳.

It’s been a week with some very confusing updates from Apple. First of all, there was the press release by Apple which was also misinterpreted by a lot of big publications who were under the impression that some big changes are coming to the App Store. In reality, not much has changed, developers are still unable to use other payment methods besides in-app purchase, but Apple generously allows them to email their users to inform them about other payment methods outside of the app. And this was already possible now anyway. There will be no changes to the App Store Search (which is in quite a bad state, so I’m sure that no changes to that can’t really be a good thing). The fact that this is presented as the evolution of the App Store, when in fact it’s part of a settlement of a process is, to say the least, very disappointing.

Then, there’s the update that came out today in which, as far as I can understand, Apple promises to update the App Store Review Guidelines next year to allow “reader” apps (so, apps like Netflix, Spotify) to offer inside the app a link to their website for “account management” purposes. Does this mean that these apps will be able to include a link to a sign up page where the users can set up a subscription without paying 15-30% comission to Apple? I don’t know, we’ll have to wait and see.

And I guess we can also include under “confusing updates” this Pull Request which seems to at least lay the foundation for backward compatibility of the new concurrency APIs in Swift. But again, no words on timeline, process, etc.

And it’s almost a month since the last Xcode Beta, and this is starting to look more and more like last year when developers had basically 1 night to get their apps ready and uploaded for the first day of iOS 14 😬

Marius Constantinescu

Tips from Twitter

• Record the simulator as GIF: a nice reminder from Ting that it’s possible to record the screen of the iOS simulator and export it as a GIF without the use of any other software

Articles

• Every SwiftUI Environment Value explained, by @zntfdr
• Mastering FocusState property wrapper in SwiftUI, by @mecid
• VIPER adoption to SwiftUI, by @michaelabadiii
• Swift Concurrency: An Introduction, by @superpeteblaze
• Exploring SwiftUI map custom annotations, by @fassko
• Best practices for building accessible mobile apps, by @dadederk
• How to define custom environment values in SwiftUI, by @sarunw
• Reverse engineering a 5 year old Xcode issue, by @rockbruno_

Business/Career

• The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform, by @apike

Videos

• Developing iOS Apps with an Accessibility Mindset, by @dadederk
• Imposter Syndrome as a Programmer, by @kilo_loco and @emanharout

Contributors

• zntfdr, mecid, abadikaka, dadederk, superpeteblaze, fassko, sarunw