After installing iOS 26 beta 3, users quickly noticed that the Liquid Glass effect is no longer as translucent as in the previous two beta releases. This change has sparked two opposing perspectives: some see it as a sign that Apple’s flagship design concept from WWDC 2025 is facing challenges, while others view it as evidence of Apple’s responsiveness to user experience data and its ability to iterate quickly. Either way, such a significant UI adjustment within a short time underscores the importance of developer betas—allowing technically savvy users with higher tolerance for change to provide feedback is essential for a company serving billions of people.
In my own experience, beta 3 feels noticeably smoother in interactions compared to beta 2. This improvement can certainly be attributed to ongoing code optimizations, but it’s also possible that the subdued Liquid Glass effect plays a role in balancing performance and energy efficiency. After all, these striking visual effects often come at the cost of computational power and battery life. Striking the right balance between delivering a distinctive UI, maintaining content readability, and managing heat and battery drain is a significant challenge for any company.
Meanwhile, Apple quietly removed Apple Intelligence-related content from its Chinese website last week. Since its introduction at WWDC 2024, Apple Intelligence has struggled to fully meet user expectations—both in terms of technical performance and regional availability. Yet, if we look across the broader consumer electronics industry, it’s clear that there are still very few products that successfully integrate AI into smart devices to deliver a truly transformative experience. For now, AI in devices remains scattered across various “highlight” features—whether it’s image erasure, text refinement, or chat assistants—all of which still fall short of the seamless vision Apple showcased at WWDC 2024.
A device that truly allows users to experience the convenience of the AI era seamlessly in daily life requires several key elements: a powerful and widely adopted on-device AI framework, energy-efficient AI chips, fast and cost-effective cloud services, and a large developer ecosystem capable of leveraging these capabilities. Without any of these elements, this vision remains elusive.
Perhaps when AI is no longer a marketing focal point, we’ll discover—almost imperceptibly—that it has already become seamlessly integrated into our work and daily lives.
Original
How to Detect Text Truncation in SwiftUI?
Text is heavily used in SwiftUI. Compared to its counterparts in UIKit/AppKit, Text requires no configuration and works out of the box, but this also means developers lose more control over it. In this article, I will demonstrate through a real-world case study how to accomplish seemingly “impossible” tasks with SwiftUI’s approach: finding the first view among a given set where text is not truncated, and using it as the required size.
Recent Recommendations
Introducing Animatable Macro in SwiftUI
Since the introduction of Swift Macros, Apple has been a strong supporter and active practitioner of this feature. At WWDC 2025, Apple brought SwiftUI developers the @Animatable macro, further simplifying the implementation of complex animatableData. In the past, adding smooth numerical animations to custom views required manually conforming to the Animatable protocol and implementing related methods. Now, it can be accomplished with just a simple macro annotation. Majid Jabrayilov demonstrates the usage of this macro in detail in this article. If you want to understand the working principles of the Animatable protocol more deeply, I recommend reading Majid’s other article The magic of Animatable values in SwiftUI as well.
CI/CD Practical Guide
CI/CD has been widely adopted by mature development teams, but due to the lack of systematic construction knowledge and uncertainty about the cost-benefit ratio, many small teams and individual developers are hesitant to adopt it. In this article series (four parts), ZhgChgLi uses an App (iOS) development team as an example to demonstrate the complete process of building a CI/CD workflow suitable for small and medium-sized development teams from scratch. The series covers theoretical foundations, tool selection, GitHub Actions implementation, complete iOS CI/CD workflows, and how to build cross-team collaborative packaging platforms. The greatest value of this series lies in providing a complete, practical, and cost-controllable CI/CD solution, offering not only theoretical guidance but also detailed implementation steps and actual runnable code examples.
Safely Renaming Your Xcode Project
Many developers don’t give much thought to project naming in the early stages of development. As projects evolve, they discover that updating an Xcode project name isn’t as simple as just changing a directory name. Pasquale Vittoriosi provides a detailed 8-step project renaming workflow in this article to avoid potential inconsistencies in file references, build settings, Bundle Identifiers, and other elements that could cause project chaos due to improper operations.
Swift and C++ Interoperability in Practice
Enabling Swift to better interoperate with other languages has always been a priority for the Swift community. The C++ interoperability feature introduced in Swift 5.9 allows developers to fully utilize mature C++ high-performance libraries while maintaining the Swift development experience. Artur Gruchała demonstrates the complete Swift-C++ interoperability workflow through a practical ATM project, including build configuration, Xcode integration, and memory management technical details. Artur states that after trying numerous cross-platform solutions, he still believes native code is the best choice, and Swift-C++ interoperability provides strong technical support for this philosophy.
Everything You Should Know About Spacer
Apple has extensively hidden implementation details in SwiftUI. For example, a simple Spacer corresponds to four different implementations in different scenarios. Kyle Ye, the main developer of the OpenSwiftUI project, recently discovered these secrets while implementing VStack/HStack layouts and reveals the internal implementation principles of Spacer in SwiftUI’s layout system through this article. _TextBaselineRelativeSpacer is particularly noteworthy as it considers text baselines when handling spacing to provide more precise typographic alignment. While the knowledge shared in such articles may not immediately manifest in your projects, as you continuously enhance your understanding of SwiftUI’s underlying mechanisms, you’ll find that you can unconsciously handle various complex layout scenarios more naturally and use SwiftUI with greater proficiency.
Presenting Secondary Windows on macOS with SwiftUI
Over the past two years, SwiftUI has significantly enhanced its performance on macOS, adding a wealth of platform-specific APIs. In this article, Gabriel Theodoropoulos focuses on how to use Window scenes (rather than WindowGroup) to create and manage secondary windows on macOS. The article covers in detail the creation, configuration, and programmatic opening and closing of windows. When I saw the numerous view modifiers beginning with window mentioned in the article, I clearly felt that SwiftUI has grown tremendously on macOS without us realizing it.
Tools
Reaper - Finding Dead Code
While generative AI accelerates code development, code quality and maintainability issues are becoming increasingly prominent. Unlike traditional static analysis tools, Reaper uses runtime analysis to monitor actual user behavior and discover code that is never touched. It supports all Objective-C classes, most non-generic Swift classes, and some Swift structs and enums. By comparing the difference between all detectable types and actually used types, developers can safely identify and remove unused code, thereby reducing security vulnerabilities, improving build speed, and enhancing code maintainability. This tool, which once helped companies like Duolingo optimize their codebases, has now been open-sourced by Emerge Tools.
Shaft - Swift-based Cross-platform UI Framework
Although Swift’s cross-platform work continues to progress, the lack of suitable native cross-platform UI frameworks still makes it difficult for many developers to truly build Swift cross-platform desktop products. Shaft combines Flutter’s self-rendering approach with Swift’s native performance, focusing on simplicity and customizability, and currently supports macOS, Linux, and Windows platforms. By porting battle-tested Flutter codebase to Swift, it significantly accelerates development while maintaining high performance and reliability, providing a new choice for developers who want Flutter-like development experience but need better performance and more direct system access capabilities.
Everything But the Code
By the time you read this newsletter, Paul Hudson’s new book “Everything but the Code” will have just been released. Unlike many of Paul’s previous technical books, this book focuses on App Store success strategies rather than programming techniques. Paul points out that among the millions of apps on the App Store, only about 1% are considered “financially successful” (earning over $100,000); most failures are not due to code issues, but rather shortcomings in ideas, design, marketing, and other aspects. Developers often focus too much on technical details while ignoring other key elements of commercial success. The book compiles practical experiences from numerous Apple Design Award-winning teams and industry experts, aiming to be readers’ “co-founder,” helping them think like designers, marketers, and CEOs. As Paul says, the difference lies in the gap between “shipping” and “succeeding.”