April 7th, 2025

I did the thing we all love to do: File -> New Project. You know that feeling. So fun. More on that below.

​Swift News - Video Version​

​Swift 6.1 Released​

Xcode 16.3 is live, which means we now have Swift 6.1. This official blog post gives an overview of the new language features, most of which focus on improving the approachability of Swift Concurrency.

​Swift by Sundell is back!​

John's articles were a Swift News staple back in the day, but he's been away for a couple years. Now that he's back it's only right that I feature his work. This article explains his hiatus and links to his return article "Modern URL Construction in Swift."

​Xcode Instruments Tutorial​

If you want to build buttery smooth, high-performance apps, you need to know how to use Xcode Instruments. Apple just released a first-party tutorial to help you get started spotting hangs and figuring out where your main thread is doing too much.

​Say Goodbye to Dismiss​

This article from Fatbobman makes the case that we shouldn't use the dismiss environment value in SwiftUI. What? For real? We all use that don't we? Turns out it can cause weird performance issues and crashes in certain circumstances.

​SwiftUI Experiments Repo​

Here's a repo that has a wide variety of cool things you can do with SwiftUI. Particles, drag gestures, text effects and more. I wanted to share this because I bet you'll get a good idea for a feature or interaction in your app and this code can help get you started.

What I'm Working On

Indie App Portfolio

I had an order of operations to get my indie app business off the ground.

1. Find an existing app to partner with using my distribution.
2. If no partnership materializes, try to buy a couple apps.
3. If buying apps doesn't work out, build one.

Here we are at number 3. That's what that File -> New Project is all about. But... it's not like options 1 and 2 are closed forever. If only it were as easy as putting out a tweet and the perfect app falls into your lap (Hey, it was worth a shot though).

In last week's edition, I said I was going to wait until after WWDC to try to buy or build an app. That's still mostly true. I'm going to tinker on this new app in the background while waiting for WWDC. If an opportunity presents itself with a WWDC announcement, then I'm all in on that. If not, then I'm all in on this new app and then I'll start talking about it.

That said, I'm still open to buying apps. I've got $100K budgeted to buy 1-3 apps that have some initial traction. See the tweet above for what I'm looking for. I'm in no rush and I'm waiting for great fits.

Creator View

I submitted a new release of Creator View to the App Store today. This release has my onboard revamp and hard paywall experiment. I also completely redid my ASO and added two ASO localizations. Will I see an increase in trial starts and conversions? I'll keep you posted.

Course Discount

I've decided to hook up my newsletter subscribers with discounts on my courses from time to time. Check out my Portfolio Piece course where we explore Swift Charts, HealthKit and Source Control with Github.

Use code SWIFT-NEWS-APRIL-7 at checkout to get 30% off. Discount code expires on Friday, April 11th.

Till next time.

Sean