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Sean Allen

Swift News: Shipaton ($700K in prizes), iOS 27 Breaking Changes, New Foundation Models Utilities & More

Published about 1 month ago • 1 min read

July 17th, 2026

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

​Shipaton - $700K in prizes mobile hackathon​

It's Shipaton time! Every year RevenueCat hosts the largest online hackathon for mobile apps. The whole point is to encourage you to finally ship that side project or finally build that app you can't get out of your head. There are tons of prizes including your app on a digital billboard in Time Square in New York City.

​Bitrig: Build Native Swift Apps with AI​

Bitrig is sponsoring Shipaton and support for RevenueCat will be added next week along with a special, discounted price for Shipaton participants. Bitrig is constantly improving and updates are shipped weekly. We recently added the ability for Bitrig to handle App Store Connect for you as well as building apps for Vision Pro and Apple TV.

​Kickstart: launch retrospective​

Speaking of shipping apps, Paul Hudson has a great article sharing what went right and what went wrong with the launch of his latest app, Kickstart. There are valuable lessoned to be learned about utilizing Test Flight and App Store preorders as well as cutting back features to ship earlier and fighting procrastination.

​iOS 27 Breaking Changes​

To be clear, this mostly applies to older apps that are still being maintained. If you still haven't adopted a SceneDelegate, don't have a Launch Screen, or are utilizing the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility flag then you're gonna have a bad time when you build and run your app on iOS 27. Check out this article and see if you need to make some changes.

​Foundation Models Framework Utilities​

Apple just open-sourced a package that adds some extra goodies if you're working with the Foundation Models Framework. Three key additions are support for the chat completions REST API, better history management, and skills.

​anyAppleOS​

In case you missed it, Swift 6.4 will clean up our @available boilerplate code a bit. As of last year, the Apple OS numbers have been unified (iOS 26, macOS 26, visionOS 26, etc...) so now we don't have to type out all the platforms and their versions numbers when we want to support all the platforms.

​Building for Dynamic Type​

When you use the system provided text styles like .title, .footnote, .caption, etc... technically you are supporting Dynamic Type. However, pretty much all the work for supporting Dynamic Type is in adapting your UI so it doesn't break when the text size is huge. This articles gives a bunch of tips on how to handle that.

Till next time,

Sean

Sean Allen

iOS Developer & Content Creator

Join thousands of developers who get Swift News delivered straight to their inbox every Monday. Stay up to date with the latest news, articles, videos, podcasts, and expert insights on Swift and iOS development. I’ll break down key topics, share my thoughts, recommend must-know resources, and give you a behind-the-scenes look at what I’m working on.

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