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I’ve been reading through the Xcode 27.3 beta release notes over my morning coffee (as one does) and noticed an update that most commentators will probably miss. So I want to give it the attention it deserves in today’s issue. And no, I’m not referring to GitHub Copilot arriving in the Coding Assistant tab 🥱.

I am talking about how Xcode now supports writing UI Tests with Swift Testing!

For years, the state-of-the-art automated testing setup for apps consisted of Unit testing, Snapshot testing, and UI testing. When Swift Testing was announced at WWDC24, it was robust enough to allow developers to migrate most of their Unit testing targets from XCTest to Swift Testing on day one. But Snapshot and UI Testing remained on XCTest due to various limitations.

Earlier this year, Swift Testing added support for Image Attachments, unlocking Snapshot testing (as it relies on attaching images to test reports). And now, Xcode 27.3 closes the gap for UI Testing - the last major blocker preventing developers from completing the migration from XCTest to Swift Testing.

The age of XCTest is over, the time of Swift Testing has come!

Or has it? Well, almost… Performance testing, albeit a rare beast in app projects, still depends on XCTest’s measure API. So, we’ll still be seeing XCTest around (and probably behind the scenes, too). Meanwhile, Swift Testing is going places XCTest never could, with Embedded Swift support now in preview.

Congrats to the Swift Testing team on all these milestones. Quite the mileage in just over 2 years!

– Alex Ozun

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News

Rather abruptly, Apple “announced” (via an inconspicuous banner on discussions.apple.com) that ‘The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026’. There isn’t much of an explanation behind the decision apart from the banner itself and the boilerplate statement Apple shared with MacRumors. The theory I’ve seen commonly discussed on the internets is that Apple doesn’t like the idea of having an official Apple-branded resource with unofficial community-authored messaging. I can see the logic behind this, but it’s hard for me to agree that nuking an entire resource is the best solution here. And certainly not in such a dismissive way of communicating. I feel bad for all the folks who put time and effort into building the knowledge base and their forum profiles over the years.

1998-2026, RIP.

Code

A perfect companion to this week’s commentary: Anastasia Petrova shares details of Depop’s large-scale migration from XCTest to Swift Testing. One would assume that simply throwing a ton of AI tokens at the problem would be the obvious choice for companies in 2026, but the Depop mobile team decided to go with a combination of deterministic conversion scripts to do the bulk of the work, with AI agents mostly coordinating the steps and finishing the “last mile”. I think this is what responsible AI-assisted engineering should look like.

I am constantly impressed by the depth of Mihaela Jakić’s articles on SwiftUI’s internals.

This new article is no different. Mihaela goes to great lengths to suss out how SwiftUI animates differently to UIKit. The answer depends on the platform: on macOS, SwiftUI animates each frame on the main thread, while on iOS/iPadOS it spins its own render thread and animates even when the main thread is blocked. Fascinating stuff, a must-read if you write custom animations!

Josh Mohrer, the developer of Wave, an AI note taking app, shares that they rebuilt their React Native app from the ground up in Swift and Kotlin. Some readers will remember Shopify announcing a similar move recently. I think the industry trend of going back to native is becoming more obvious, with AI agents doing a lot of heavy-lifting associated with maintaing two separate codebases.

Karin Prater provides the ultimate overview and comparison of common architectural patterns in SwiftUI. Wait, are we still debating architectures in 2026? Yes, yes we are! And I hope we don’t stop any time soon 🙂 But if you still need a reason to care about all these architectural patterns, Karin has four good ones: communication, documentation, job interviews, and legacy code.

Tools

When I saw the promo screenshots of Whio, Natalia Panferova’s new reader app for technical books, with their colourful graphics and code blocks, I thought they had been made with cherry-picked, well-formatted books. But then I tried it with some random tech ebooks from my library and, to my surprise, they were all parsed and rendered just as beautifully as in the screenshots! Accessibility features, like support for dyslexia-friendly fonts, are a nice touch too. Well done, Natalia!

Reading technical books has long been a part of an engineering career, and now listening to tech podcasts is becoming an increasingly common way to keep up with the industry.

Ben Rice McCarthy has just announced the launch of their podcast player - Tripod. The app is excellent! It’s packed with quality-of-life features like transcripts, silence trimming, clip sharing, and more. I have no doubt it will become the podcast player of choice for many in the dev community. Well done, Ben!

Business and Marketing

I’ve always admired conference organisers for the immense mental fortitude required to put a conference together and keep it rolling, year after year, without losing their sanity. Josh Holtz, the organiser of Deep Dish Swift, shares the mental process (and turmoil) behind running the conference. I really like the browser tabs analogy: “You know when you have a browser with way too many tabs open? Each one is something you’re not done with yet. […] That’s what Deep Dish feels like in my head for most of the year”. I haven’t had a chance yet to attend Deep Dish, telling myself “I’ll go next year” multiple years in a row now. But Josh reminds us that there’s never a guarantee that next year’s edition will happen. And as we saw with some Swift conferences closing doors recently, it’s especially true now. He reassures us that Deep Dish 2027 is definitely happening, but leaves open the possibility of it being The Last Slice. Finally, I’m gonna answer Josh’s direct question at the end of the article: “So I want to ask you, would you come?” My answer is Yes!

Ben Scheirman, whom many readers will know as the host of the excellent NSScreencast, shares his thoughts on why faster coding with AI doesn’t automatically accelerate delivery. I want to quote Ben’s opening analogy directly. It’s so good that I’m definitely stealing it!

“I’m sure we’ve all seen this before… You’re driving and there’s a car speeding and weaving in and out of other cars, driving dangerously and passes you. You observe them pass a few other cars and then they are out of sight. Then a couple minutes later you pull up to a light and that same car is right next to you. All that effort, and they aren’t any faster.”

Videos

The full swiftCon 2026 playlist is now up on YouTube, with plenty of great talks to catch up on. You might even spot mine on the list 🤫

And finally...

We could always download more RAM, and now we can also install PROLED XDR on our regular displays!