June 16th, 2025

After brief hiatus due to travel and working on my next app, Swift News is back! And there's a lot to talk about because we're fresh of the best week of the year, WWDC.

In this edition of Swift News I share some of my favorite highlights and give my thoughts on them.

What are you most excited to build this summer that was announced at WWDC?

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​Swift News - Video Version - Get my thoughts on the articles below.

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​Meet Liquid Glass​

I'm a fan of the new design because of the crazy amount of detail that went into it. It's not just a frosted glass UI. It's alive. It's fluid. It's interactive. The edges of the glass even reflect the UI elements near it... The detail is just insane.

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​Meet Foundation Models Framework​

This is a huge deal. Will the on-device LLM be anywhere near as powerful as the 3rd party server-based LLMs? Of course not. But there are many advantages that the Foundation Models Framework has. It's on-device, so no internet required and no API keys to manage and secure. It's free. It's private. It can have knowledge of the types in your codebase and include them in it's response.

I highly encourage you to learn all you can about this new framework and see how you can implement it into your apps. It's a big deal.

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​Human Interface Guidelines & Liquid Glass​

Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) has been updated with best practices for adopting Liquid Glass into your apps. If you're unfamiliar with the HIG, it's essentially Apple's guide to building world-class user interfaces. Read it. Study it. Learn it. It's updated all the time with the latest and greatest and has just been updated for Liquid Glass.

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​2025 Apple Design Award Winners​

I share this article each and every year with the same exact advice each and every year. If you want to make the best app you can, go through this list and download the winners and finalists. Play with and study those apps. Take inspiration on how you can implement your own version of their great ideas into your apps. Remember, great artists steal.

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​Big App Store ASO Algorithm Change​

A lot of indie devs noticed a drastic change in their App Store rankings over the past couple weeks. Everyone was wondering what the hell was going on and what changed. Well, App Figures was on the case, did a bunch of reverse engineering and here's what they found: Apple is now using keywords from your App Store Screenshots as part of your meta data to determine rankings. That's the TLDR. Read the article for more info.

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​Stop Overthinking AI Subscriptions​

Check out this article by Peter Steinberger where he breaks down the costs of various AI tools. But it's pretty simple (and I can personally attest to this), even at $200 per month tools like ChatGPT Codex or Claude Code are no-brainer purchases.

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What I'm Working On

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Indie App Portfolio

Here's a refresher on my situation from a few weeks ago:

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).

Back to today (June 16th)...

I am about a week or two from launching the app I started above. I haven't really talked about it yet because I'm waiting until it's launched to start sharing everything. This is the first app that I'm going to lean heavily into marketing so that will be a fun process to share. More on this in the coming weeks...

iOS Dev Courses

I put my Concurrency course on the back-burner because I'm just not confident it will sell enough. I don't think the demand is high enough for Swift 6 strict concurrency yet and I believe AI has taken a huge chunk out of online course businesses. My courses take 3-4 months of intense work to complete, so if I'm going to do a course I have to be confident it will do well.

So for now... it's an "Indie Dev Summer" for me. I'm pumped.

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Till next time,

Sean