March 31st, 2025

You know the saying. If you’re not at least a little embarrassed by version one, you launched too late.

Well… here we are 😅

This is the very first edition of the Swift News newsletter. It’s rough, but I’ll be improving it each week. I want to create something you actually look forward to every Monday.

In addition to this week's links, I'm including a section called “What I’m Working On” where I share updates from my content creator and indie app business.

Let me know what else would be valuable to you. I’m all ears.

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​WWDC 2025 Dates Announced​

The dates are June 9-13 and it's the standard format that it's been the past few years. In person Keynote event in Cupertino and then videos released throughout the week. I dunno about you, but I'm pretty pumped for the rumored iOS 19 redesign.

​SwiftUI Lifecycle Refresher​

It's always good to go back and drill the fundamentals (or learn them for the first time) and this article walks through and explains the SwiftUI Lifecycle. Not understanding this and doing things in the wrong part of the lifecycle can cause weird and unexpected behaviors.

​Under the Hood: SwiftUI​

Keeping with the theme of drilling the fundamentals this article is a great high-level overview of how SwiftUI works... under the hood. If you're a relative beginner with SwiftUI this is must-know stuff and if you're experienced, this is a great refresher.

​Death by Paper Cut​

In this article, Donny Wals discusses why small optimizations may not seem like a big deal in the moment, but can really add up over time. And these go against you too. Ignoring these small optimizations can really bog down your app over the long run. But there's nuance. We don't want to get into the realm of premature over-optimization.

​Do "Ugly" Paywalls Work?​

"Ugly" is a bit harsh. Simple is probably the better term. This article discusses the idea of getting rid of all that flashy stuff on your paywall and going with a dead simple version. Can it work for your app?

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What I'm Working On

Buying an App

As you may have seen, I put out a video looking to buy a couple iOS apps to establish my indie dev app portfolio. I received a ton of responses, however most of them didn't fit the initial traction criteria (revenue, users, downloads, etc...). I did say "shoot your shot" in the video, so I'm not mad about it.

I had a handful of promising responses that didn't pan out. They were good fits, not great fits, and for that reason my offers didn't meet the sellers asking price. Because I'm only looking for 1 or 2 apps, I need to hold out and really go for the great fits.

Responses to that video have died down, so after an unsuccessful first stab at it, I'm going to hold off on trying again until after WWDC. We never know what will be announced that sparks an app opportunity, so I want to have my plate as clear as possible so I can pounce if needed (a'la Widgetsmith in iOS 14). If no opportunity presents itself, then I'll make another run at acquiring an app or two.

Creator View

I spent some time and completely redesigned my onboard flow. I think it's pretty good. I did this because I'm going to test a hard paywall to see if that helps with conversions. I believe if you're going to have a hard paywall, you need to have the best onboard flow possible for it to work. This will be my first attempt at it and it releases in a couple days. Hopefully we see that conversion increase 🤞.

Concurrency Course

I've begun working on my next course which will tackle the difficult topic of Swift Concurrency with Swift 6 strict concurrency checking. This is a topic every iOS developer will need to know for modern Swift codebases. I want to deliver the best video course to help you wrap your head around it. My goal is to have it ready to launch by WWDC. But... I really suck with time estimates, so that's a very loose estimate.

Closing Thoughts

That does it for the first edition. If you have ideas that would make this newsletter more valuable to you, I'd love to hear it.

Till next time.

Sean

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