Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of iOS development teaching and have accumulated some experience exploring local AI applications. For instance, testing on iPhone 17 Pro Max revealed: Foundation Models generate tokens about 25% faster on A19 Pro than on MacBook M3 Max. I’ll explain the reasons in upcoming articles, but you can see that Apple’s hardware performance improvements have huge advantages for local AI inference.

Beyond hardware performance, running local AI on iPhones has many interesting aspects and prospects. I think many iOS developers don’t want to “do AI for AI’s sake,” or want to add it but don’t know how to start. In reality, some situations for developing AI applications simply didn’t exist before Foundation Models or A19 Pro were released. Starting today, you’re on the same starting line as developers worldwide—no need to worry about falling behind. Even I’m researching and sharing as I go!

I plan to write multiple articles covering:

Observed facts, testing methods and results, Apple’s advantages in local AI, issues with development experience and possible developments, and presenting a major insight: iOS developers are the group of people in the world with the best opportunity to create excellent local AI application user experiences, bar none.

If you’re an iOS developer, this is a series of articles you won’t want to miss. If you’re already interested but haven’t joined as a member yet, take advantage of the Black Friday offer that only happens once a year for the 13+ column.

Subscribe to 13+ on Patreon, enter discount code LOCALAI, and enjoy 13% off your first month. Available only until Cyber Monday 2025/12/01 23:59.

Honestly, offering discounts isn’t my style. But this series will contain observations + experience sharing + operational instructions + insights that you can’t read elsewhere, and it will be content that best demonstrates the value of the 13+ column. I want to give friends who’ve been on the fence a good reason to join.

If you’re unfamiliar with 13+, check out the website directory to see what article topics we’ve covered. I particularly recommend the Special Feature: Investigating the Impact of iPhone USB Speed on Development Experience, which has extensive testing, hands-on operations, and insights—you could say it’s the predecessor to the local AI series. Additionally, from mid-August until now, I’ve been challenging myself to publish new articles every workday, so every Monday through Friday morning you can read a new piece—it’s great mental stimulation and learning for readers.

Tomorrow will be the last article of November, which as usual will be a monthly review sharing my favorite articles. Starting next Monday, we’ll launch the iOS local AI article series.

Finally, please share this announcement with iOS developers around you, or friends interested in AI application development. I believe it will help many people!

The Mobile Application Innovation Contest (MAIC) is a student app development competition jointly organized by Apple Education Taiwan, Feng Chia University, Straight A (Studio A’s education brand), and National Taiwan University’s Apple Regional Training Center (RTC).

Competing apps are primarily built for Apple platforms, mostly iOS and visionOS. Think of this as Apple’s Greater China Region contest. After Taiwanese teams compete locally, they advance to the Greater China Region Finals at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

This year, Taiwanese students delivered their best performance ever at the Grand Finals:

• First Prize: VCook (Chung Yuan Christian University • VC)

• First Prize: iMirror Immersive Mirror Rehabilitation System (National Taiwan University • iMirror Lab)

• Second Prize + Social Responsibility Innovation Award: Savers Near-Expiry Product Map (National Tsing Hua University, National Central University • iNTER)

• Second Prize: Sound of Life (Feng Chia University • Sound of Life Team)

• Outstanding Organization Award: Feng Chia University

The demo videos below are all from the Taiwan competition. The Greater China Grand Finals should have newer, much improved versions, but I haven’t found them yet.

⟪VCook⟫is an AI recipe app independently developed by Vincent using the latest Foundation Models, now available on the App Store.

⟪iMirror⟫is mirror therapy software utilizing Apple Vision Pro’s gesture recognition capabilities, a very advanced concept. It also originates from actual needs of team members’ family, complete with a backstory.

⟪Savers Near-Expiry Product Map⟫strives to solve the problem of near-expiry food waste.

⟪Sound of Life⟫is learning software designed for hearing-impaired children.

I’ve had the privilege of interacting with these award-winning students—they’re all student developers with tremendous creativity and practical ability. I’m genuinely happy for them.

More coverage:

• Commercial Times: Taiwan Teams Win Double First Prizes at Apple’s “10th 2025 Mobile Application Innovation Contest” Greater China Grand Finals, Best Performance in Ten Years

• Yahoo News: Taiwan Teams Win Double First Prizes Apple’s “10th 2025 Mobile Application Innovation Contest” Greater China Grand Finals Creates Best Performance in Ten Years

• Feng Chia University: AI Gives Voice to Hearing-Impaired Children, Feng Chia’s “Sound of Life” Wins Second Prize at Apple Mobile Application Innovation Contest Greater China Region

If you’re a student, consider following next year’s MAIC. Before that, focus on the Swift Student Challenge introduced below.

Swift Student Challenge 2026

While MAIC is a Greater China Region competition, Apple also has an international student coding challenge called Swift Student Challenge, now in its seventh year since 2020. Students aged 13 and above can participate (or according to local regulations).

Submission period: 2/6-28, 2026.

The most attractive aspect of Swift Student Challenge is that Distinguished Winners receive full sponsorship to visit Apple headquarters in the US for WWDC and closely interact with winners from around the world. It’s an excellent opportunity to expand your global perspective.

This competition emphasizes creativity, not code. You can develop using the Swift Playgrounds app on iPad.

Official links:

• Swift Student Challenge Official Website

• Developers decode their journeys from app ideas to App Store (Apple Newsroom)

• Get ready

• Eligibility and requirements

• Terms and Conditions

The most important thing when entering a competition is understanding the rules clearly, followed by properly planning and executing your participation.

Swift Student Challenge has many restrictions. I’ve compiled some key rules below:

• Final product is a Swift Playground App (file extension .swiftpm) compressed into a ZIP

• Maximum file size is 25 MB

• Must work completely offline

• Solo independent development

• Developed and run using Swift Playgrounds 4.6 or Xcode 26 or above

• Can use Apple Pencil

• User interface and content must be in English

Sometimes, having many restrictions isn’t a bad thing—it helps you focus more on creative expression.

If you want to participate, there are still several months until the submission deadline. I think you can start with simple needs around you, completing some simple small apps and exercises to familiarize yourself with Xcode, Swift, SwiftUI, and establish your own development workflow.

While familiarizing yourself with the process, more ideas will definitely emerge. There are also many AI tools that can assist. Even starting development in the final month is manageable.

The key is creative ideas—development doesn’t need to be perfect on the first try.

13+ Exclusive Content

The following section is exclusive to 13+ members, including:

• More detailed discussion of competition restrictions

• Reflections on interacting with and teaching students

Please upgrade to unlock at Patreon and read on the official website.

Key Highlights

• iOS Conf SG 2025 Super Early Bird Tickets

• try! Swift Tokyo 2026 Super Early Bird Tickets and Call for Proposals

• iPlayground 2026 Dates Announced

• Taiwan “iOSDC Translation Group” Launches Official Traditional Chinese Channel with 14 Videos

Listed below by conference schedule:

🇸🇬iOS Conf SG 2026

Key Information:

• Official Website & Tickets: https://www.iosconf.sg/

• Dates: 1/21-23. Day 1 is workshops, days 2-3 are sessions

• Location: Singapore, specific venue not yet announced

• Keynote speakers announced, call for proposals not yet open

Current ticket types:

• Super Early Bird All-In Pass | S$299: Includes day 1 workshops and days 2-3 sessions

• Super Early Bird Conference Pass | S$199: Includes days 2-3 sessions

• Individual Sponsor | S$899: Individual sponsor ticket

For the conference experience, check out Jane’s video from 2023.

🇯🇵try! Swift Tokyo 2026

Key Information:

• Official Website: https://tryswift.jp/en/

• Dates: 2026/4/12-14. Day 1 is workshops, days 2-3 are sessions

• Location: TACHIKAWA STAGE GARDEN, same venue as 2025

• Recently opened call for proposals and speaker recommendations form

• Ticket Link

Current ticket types:

• Super Swift Bird | ¥16,500

• Individual Sponsor | ¥33,000

To learn more about Japanese iOS conferences, check out my article 🇯🇵iPlayground & Japanese iOS Conference Cross-Border Connections.

🇹🇼iPlayground 2026 is Coming

Key Information:

• Official Announcement (Newsletter):

iPlayground

2026 iPlayground 要來了

大家好，我是 Hokila。這是我第一次寫電子報，好緊張喔！之前都是宣傳組幫忙寫的。不過隨著活動結束，工作人員群組也解散了，明年的工作人員還沒有開始募集，目前工作群組就只剩客服功能。…

Read more

6 months ago · Hokila Jan

• Dates: 2026/7/25-26, add it to your calendar now!

• Location: NCCU Center for Public and Business Administration Education same as 2025

• Tentative ticket prices, schedule, free ticket acquisition methods all announced in the newsletter

🇯🇵🇹🇼iOSDC Translation Group

This is an initiative started by iPlayground organizer Hokila after attending this year’s iOSDC Japan, deciding to form a Traditional Chinese translation group.

After authorization from iOSDC officials and speakers, 6 members, and 2 weeks of effort, the “iOSDC Translation Group” YouTube channel is now live! Subscribe now!

Video list:

• Tips for Building High-Performance GIF Animation Playback by noppe (@noppefoxwolf)

• QR Code Has N Types of Specifications! by Ryomm (@__ryomm)

• The Resolve of Customizing UI by まつじ (@mtj_j)

• What I Saw and Heard After Analyzing 100 Popular Apps’ Paywall Designs by Akihiro Kokubo (@akihiro_kokubo)

• Let’s Write a Train Journey Tracking Algorithm by Chris Trott (@twocentstudios)

• Complete Analysis of Logging Infrastructure Design Supporting Over 50 Million Downloads Manga Service by デスクス (@dsxsxsxs)

• Introduction to Music Composition for Software Engineers by CHEEBOW (@cheebow)

• Learning WebP While Doing by 岸川克己 (@k_katsumi)

• Swift Build Mini Guide—Key Technologies for Building Swift’s New Ecosystem by giginet (@giginet)

• Exploring the Mysteries of Time and Location—From the Age of Exploration to Near-Future Technology by 綾木良太 (@ayakix)

• It’s Time to Use FormatStyle by treastrain / Tanaka Ryoga (@treastrain)

• The Road to Making Xcode Previews Practical in Large Apps by ikesyo (@ikesyo)

• Everything About MyNumber Card on iPhone by Daiki Matsudate (@d_date)

• Breaking Through iOS App Background Limitations: The Challenge of Keeping Upload Processing Running After Entering Backgroundby Hikaru Sato (@SatoHikaruDev)

I didn’t participate in this achievement at all (because I don’t know Japanese). Hokila wrote a truly spectacular announcement article and session newsletter (iPlayground Newsletter), and there’s even a “Song of Submission for Review” at the end—you must check it out!

Translation group members’ individual reflection articles:

• Hokila: iOSDC Translation Group

• Vincent: iOSDC 2025 Japanese-to-Chinese Translation Group Afterword

• Mori: iOSDC Session Translation Reflection

Not having time to attend iOSDC is my small regret this year, and the two times I did attend, I felt helpless only being able to read English on the slides. So a huge thank you to the translation group!

Other Conferences Awaiting 2026 News

The following conferences I know were held in 2025, but there’s no news yet for next year:

• Let’s vision 2025/3/1-2

• KWDC 2025/9/5

• iOSDC Japan 2025/9/19-21

13+ Exclusive Content

The following section is exclusive to 13+ members, including:

• Conference dates table (continuously updated)

• Key recommendations for each conference

Please upgrade to unlock at Patreon and read on the official website.

From 13

The other day I announced that ⟪13 Newsletter⟫ and ⟪13+⟫ would be integrated, and this report is the first one.

Simply put, I’ll share developer news irregularly in ⟪13 Newsletter⟫, abandoning the previous “weekly” format. The same articles will also be published in ⟪13+⟫ with more in-depth coverage. To read the complete version, please upgrade to ⟪13+⟫ membership on Patreon.

Now to the main topic. This year, I’ve observed that Apple is redefining “developer events.” From the annual conference format, it has evolved into a hybrid strategy distributed across time and location. Let’s start with Apple’s YouTube channel.

Changes in WWDC Videos

Starting with WWDC20, affected by the pandemic, both Keynotes and technical Sessions shifted to pre-recorded video format. Even after the pandemic when lottery-based Keynote attendance opened up—allowing people to visit the Cupertino spaceship campus—attendees would watch pre-recorded videos on the big lawn at the scheduled time.

By WWDC25 this year, Apple released all videos on the first day of the event. This was a significant shift. Developers could quickly find topics of interest and rush to experiment and book Lab sessions to ask questions.

What delighted me was that this year Apple also uploaded all WWDC videos to YouTube, no longer limiting them to the official website and Developer App. This significantly improved video distribution, searchability, and viewing experience.

For instance, since I subscribe to YouTube Premium, I don’t have to worry about ads. Moreover, I can download large numbers of videos to my phone for offline viewing. The YouTube iOS App does this much better than the Apple Developer App.

Hosting on YouTube also makes it convenient to embed in web pages, such as for educational materials.

Online Events and Live Streams

Developers who attended WWDC19 and earlier (including me) miss the old in-person conferences. Looking at this year’s strategy of releasing all videos on day one, Apple is unlikely to return to the previous format of hosting WWDC.

However, in recent years, Apple has started establishing Developer Centers around the world and hosting online and in-person seminars in different time slots. This essentially extends what used to be a week-long WWDC with concentrated resources into hosting short-term small events in various locations.

Current Developer Centers are located at Cupertino headquarters in the US, Bangalore in India, Singapore, and Shanghai. Some events are also held in hotels in major cities or local Apple offices. Future events can be found on the Meet with Apple official website.

I believe Apple’s transition isn’t just due to superficial reasons like “pre-recorded videos are controllable and can be presented perfectly.” Rather, it’s because the global developer community is massive with extreme regional differences. Establishing local touchpoints and activities to enhance developer relations will have a more far-reaching impact than the previous week-long concentrated WWDC.

While this approach diminishes the sense of WWDC as an annual grand event, I believe this “locally-rooted” strategy is moving in the right direction.

In summary, as Apple developers, we can make better use of events on Meet with Apple to enrich our technical knowledge, talk with Apple engineers, and get feedback on design or review issues. As a Taiwanese developer, I also hope Apple will host more developer events in Taiwan.

You can watch public event recordings and live streams on the Apple Developer YouTube channel.

Here are the latest videos:

App Performance & AI

• Code along with the Foundation Models framework

• Optimize your app’s speed and efficiency

Multimedia & Immersive Experiences

• Day 1 | Create immersive media experiences for visionOS

• Day 2 | Create immersive media experiences for visionOS

• IETF HLS Interest Day

Gaming

• Press Start: Game development on Apple platforms

The following section is exclusive to 13+ members, including:

• My most recommended event videos

• New YouTube video timestamp jumping feature on the 13+ website

Please upgrade to unlock at Patreon and read on the official website.

Collecting materials and writing the newsletter has become increasingly mechanical for me, lacking significant challenge.

On the other hand, since mid-August, I’ve been publishing a new article every weekday in the 13+ column. These contents are carefully thought out and organized outputs.

I still have passion for writing, but it’s currently not focused on the newsletter. And passion is the most precious thing for a creator.

The newsletter has accumulated 251 issues with over 2,800 subscribers and should have helped many people. I don’t want to terminate this newsletter just because my enthusiasm has waned.

I believe the right approach is to adjust the operation model to make it more interesting for me.

Abandoning Fixed Weekly Updates

So, how can writing the Apple Developer Weekly become interesting? The key is to have things I find fun and interesting, that I think are important for developers to know, plus my commentary and experience sharing.

To achieve this, I feel we can no longer continue with the “weekly” publication frequency.

Weekly publication comes with deadline time constraints, content is limited to the previous week’s news, and I don’t have time to research the news content. Over time, the reporting process becomes repetitive labor: collecting materials, organizing titles (including selecting emojis), writing supplementary text, formatting, and then scheduling publication.

If I could explore things without time pressure, I might be able to share some interesting discoveries. This would not only be more interesting for me but also provide readers with more than just surface-level news (Want to experience what “surface-level” means? Recent important developer news is listed at the end of this article).

Simply put, it’s about transforming “Apple Developer Weekly” into “Apple Developer News & Commentary,” without limiting it to the most recent week’s timeframe and topics.

In the future, the writing angle will focus more on:

• What recent Apple developer news is worth knowing?

• Why did I select this news, and why do I think it’s important for developers?

• How does it relate to perspectives or experiences I’ve written about?

Integration with 13+ Column

13+ Column is where my writing passion currently lies, publishing articles every day, almost transforming from a blog into an “Apple Developer Daily.”

However, the situation is a bit subtle. What do I mean? I write about iOS development-related topics every day, but the content rarely addresses “recent” iOS-related news, which seems somewhat unreasonable.

I think 13+ readers would also want to read my commentary and perspectives on some development current events.

So the answer becomes increasingly clear: I should integrate the two publications.

Let me research or analyze some interesting development current events and write them into articles. Part of the content remains free and will be published in the original ethanhuang13.com. More in-depth content will be reserved exclusively for 13+ (ethanhuang13.plus) paid members.

This way, existing newsletter readers will receive the “Apple Developer News & Commentary Newsletter” on an irregular basis (this name is too straightforward😅, I’m still thinking of a better one). The content will be important developer news I’ve selected, with my perspectives and commentary, even hands-on experience.

You can imagine it as current event commentary in the style of 13+ articles.

As for publication frequency, if there are many good things to discuss, publishing several pieces a week wouldn’t be unusual. But if there are no topics worth sharing, we’ll leave it.

Existing newsletter readers (including English version readers) don’t need to make any subscription adjustments.

And the enhanced extended version of this newsletter will be published on 13+, counting as one of the daily updates on 13+. The enhanced content I plan to include:

• More in-depth perspective discussions

• Code examples

• Complete supplementary materials

• Thought-provoking questions

• Action prompts

• Key takeaways

Simply put, if you’re not satisfied with the free version on ethanhuang13.com, you can upgrade to paid 13+ membership. (I don’t have an English version, though.)

Summary

After integrating the two newsletters, I expect the positioning to be:

• 13 (ethanhuang13.com): “Apple Developer News & Commentary” basic version, irregular updates, can be several pieces a week when there’s good stuff to discuss, or left alone when there’s nothing. Remains free subscription, existing members don’t need to make adjustments (but upgrades to 13+ for the complete version are very welcome)

• 13+ (ethanhuang13.plus): Paid subscription, unchanged with a new article every weekday, adding a new category of the complete version of “Apple Developer News & Commentary” with more in-depth discussions, materials, code examples, etc.

Integrating the two newsletter brands will allow me to concentrate my energy and passion on writing better content. For existing newsletter readers, you’ll get more valuable perspectives and experience sharing. 13+ readers will receive my commentary on recent developments with member-exclusive content.

Thank you for the long-term support from Apple Developer Weekly and 13+ readers. Please let me know your thoughts, thank you.

Finally, let me list some recent important developer news. Just from these items alone, I could write at least 5 articles. If I continue to maintain a weekly publication format, those articles might never come to be. But going forward, they might show up in your inbox at any time😉

26.1 Official Release and 26.1 beta 1 Launched

• Please refer to Apple Releases

2026 Asia iOS Developer Conferences Ready to Roll

• 2026 iPlayground is Coming

• try! Swift Tokyo 2026 Super Swift Bird on Sale

• iOS Conf SG 2026/1/21-23

App Store Business Updates

• App Store launched web version, making it easier for developers to view App Store across different platforms and regions

Apple Student Developer Competition News

• Mobile Application Innovation Contest 2025 Finals Winners, Taiwanese students performed brilliantly

• Swift Student Challenge upload period 2026/2/6-28, announced on official website

AI News Apple Developers Should Care About

• Apple Intelligence features are now available in Traditional Chinese

• Mattt released AnyLanguageModel compatible with Foundation Models syntax

• ChaoCode‘s HuggingFace series videos: Easily Try Various AI Apps with Spaces, Understanding “Model Pages” from a Beginner’s Perspective

Apple Developer YouTube Channel Recently Started Live Recording

• Code along with the Foundation Models framework

• Day 1 | Create immersive media experiences for visionOS

• Day 2 | Create immersive media experiences for visionOS

• IETF HLS Interest Day

• Optimize your app’s speed and efficiency

• Press Start: Game development on Apple platforms

The newsletter accidentally took a few weeks of vacation.
This issue, I tried compiling and writing the newsletter without AI assistance, and it felt pretty good.
Apple’s newly announced M5 processor looks incredibly powerful, making me even more excited about the yet-to-be-released M5 Pro, Max, and Ultra versions.
All platforms’ 26.1 has reached beta 4, seems like the official release is coming soon.
Besides these major items, this issue also has plenty of useful tips, please take a close look.
13 on October 27, 2025

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

The 13+ column continues its challenge of daily weekday updates. Welcome to join if you’d like to receive daily doses of development knowledge and thought stimulation.

Especially don’t miss the series Drawing Mac with SwiftUI.

• 2025-10-09: 🕳️What Happens When You Open a Folder in Xcode? A Development Pitfall from Teaching

• 2025-10-10: 🐜Three Reasons to Recommend Hollow Knight and Silksong

• 2025-10-13: ⚠️iOS Development Missing Manual: You Only Get One Chance to Enable iPad Support (Free)

• 2025-10-14: 💻Learning SwiftUI: Why Start by Drawing Mac?

• 2025-10-15: 🖥️Practice Drawing Mac mini with SwiftUI: Starting from Top View

• 2025-10-16: 💸Features You’ve Already Paid For But Never Used

• 2025-10-17: 🖥️Practice Drawing Mac mini with SwiftUI: Front View

• 2025-10-20: 🖥️Practice Drawing Mac mini with SwiftUI: Bottom View

• 2025-10-21: 🧱Reduce Developer Occupational Hazards, Buy a Phone Stand

• 2025-10-22: 🖥️Build Your Own Workspace

• 2025-10-23: 🖥️Practice Drawing Mac mini with SwiftUI: Summary

• 2025-10-24: 💻My Dream MacBook

• 2025-10-27: 🗾Never Too Late for Vacation

💻Apple Announces M5 Series Devices

Apple Silicon M5 chip, MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, Vision Pro were released without a launch event.

• Apple unleashes M5, the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon

• Apple unveils new 14‑inch MacBook Pro powered by the M5 chip, delivering the next big leap in AI for the Mac

• Apple introduces the powerful new iPad Pro with the M5 chip

• Apple Vision Pro upgraded with the powerful M5 chip and comfortable Dual Knit Band

M5 significantly outperforms M4 in various computing benchmarks, and in specific scenarios can even compete with high-end chips like M1 Ultra, M3 Max, and M4 Pro. There’s no news yet about M5 Pro or M5 Max, but they’re highly anticipated.

Regarding MacBook Pro M5 performance reviews, these YouTube videos are worth watching:

• MacBook Pro M5性能测试：新架构GPU能带来什么？ by 极客湾Geekerwan

• M5 MacBook Pro performance is INSANE: 10 games tested by Andrew Tsai

🤖Announcing the Swift SDK for Android

Swift’s official Android SDK has been released and can be used on macOS, Linux, and Windows platforms.

There’s also the swift-java project for interoperability.

🧪Apple Releases

• Xcode 26.1 beta 3 (17B5045g) includes a fix for an SPM cache logic bug. It was supposed to not re-fetch before expiration (within 1 hour), but the > operator was reversed. Developers can observe how Xcode 26.1 performs when deployed to CI. Developer ZachNagengast not only identified the issue and submitted a PR, but also documented the detailed problem-solving approach in it, showing commendable spirit and attitude

• iOS 26.1 beta 4 (23B5073a)

• macOS 26.1 beta 4 (25B5072a)

• tvOS 26.1 beta 4 (23J5571a)

• visionOS 26.1 beta 4 (23N5042a)

• watchOS 26.1 beta 4 (23S5031a)

• FairPlay Streaming Server SDK 26

• TN3190: USB audio device design considerations

• TN3193: Managing the on-device foundation model’s context window

• TN3194: Handling account deletions and revoking tokens for Sign in with Apple

• Apple Tutorials: Develop in Swift added two new courses: App design and App development.

• Apple TV+ service renamed to Apple TV

🖼️iOS 26.1 PhotoKit Background Backup Upload Mechanism

In iOS 26.1 and later, PhotoKit provides a new Background Resource Upload extension type that enables photo apps to provide seamless cloud backup experiences. The system … calls your extension when it’s time to process uploads, and it automatically handles network connectivity, power management, and timing to provide reliable processing.

This new extension is for apps to backup photos in the background. It should be quite useful for third-party cloud storage or NAS apps with iOS photo backup functionality.

🥷I Held Off Geohot for 30 Minutes by zonble

According to zonble, this was one of the topics he couldn’t present at this year’s iPlayground.

After reading it, I think: Could the master hacker have failed not because of the challenge, but because he was defeated by Taiwanese appetite?

📺ChaoCode Channel New Videos

• Introduction to AgentKit: Add AI Chatbot to Your Website

• Hugging Face: Easily Try Various AI Apps with Spaces (No Code Required)

Member-exclusive videos:

• TipKit Tutorial ep 1: TipKit Basic Introduction & Quick Setup for Tips and Interactive Guidance

• TipKit Tutorial ep 2: Customizing TipView Style

• TipKit Tutorial ep 3: Managing Multiple Tips with TipGroup, Setting Display Rules (One Tip at a Time, Sequential Display)

💡Development Tips Spotted on Twitter

• https://x.com/KyleSwifter/status/1979849200222531959 For SwiftUI performance, especially List and ForEach, you can use the LogForEachSlowPath launch argument to see more warning logs

• https://x.com/steipete/status/1932523406987317338 UIKit and AppKit in 26 have a mechanism for updating through Observation. This mechanism has been backported to iOS 18, enabled by adding UIObservationTrackingEnabled in Info.plist

• https://x.com/gwenshap/status/1979414416258167142 Did you know? macOS has a built-in network speed test command, just type networkquality to run it

• https://x.com/timi2506/status/1977357388513517801 Apple Remote Desktop app also added support for Liquid Glass

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you’ve been too busy to read last week’s content, here are the highlights:

• 📊Introducing Swift Profile Recorder: Identifying Performance Bottlenecks in Production

• 🔒Secure your app with Memory Integrity Enforcement | Meet with Apple

• 📱How iPhone 4 “Fixed” Antennagate

That’s all for this week’s Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Please subscribe to 13+ Premium Column to support my writing, thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

Taiwan only had a three-day work week this week, so I started compiling the weekly newsletter content a bit later, and now the week is ending, haha.

Apple just released 26.1 beta 2 for all platforms. Both TestFlight and App Store Connect apps have also been updated to the Liquid Glass version (though the Apple Developer app hasn’t yet)

13 on October 8, 2025

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

The 13+ column continues its challenge of daily weekday updates. Welcome to join if you’d like to receive daily doses of development knowledge and thought stimulation.

• ⚡️Exploring iPhone USB Speed Impact on Development Experience: Research Strategy and Conclusion Series finale

• 🤖Using AI More Efficiently and Cleverly—My Current AI Tools Usage (September 2025) After understanding my needs and tool purposes, significantly reduced costs

• 🔄Easily Sync Cursor and VS Code Settings Across Devices Without Packages Simple concept, highly practical

• 🤖If the Reader of This Article is AI... Previous article, a reader directly gave it to Claude Code for one-time setup, giving me new inspiration

• 💡Quick Knowledge: Apple Device UDID Assembly Rules You can tell what SoC it is from the ID

• 🪟Super Useful Tips for Managing SwiftUI Preview Windows Did you know? Preview can simultaneously display multiple devices, even multiple platforms, like iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch

🧪Apple Releases

• Xcode 26.1 beta 2 (17B5035f)

• iOS 26.1 beta 2 (23B5059e)

• iPadOS 26.1 beta 2 (23B5059e) This version restored Slide Over functionality

• macOS 26.1 beta 2 (25B5057f)

• tvOS 26.1 beta 2 (23J5558e)

• visionOS 26.1 beta 2 (23N5028e)

• watchOS 26.1 beta 2 (23S5017d)

• TestFlight 4.0 Reportedly has a new feature “Tester Matching,” which can “discover apps worth testing based on your interests.” However, no visible effects yet

• Transporter 1.4

• AppMigrationKit Brand new API in iOS 26.1. Documentation is still incomplete, but the purpose is to copy data from the same app on other non-Apple platforms (e.g., Android) to the iOS app

📊 Introducing Swift Profile Recorder: Identifying Performance Bottlenecks in Production

Apple open-sourced Swift Profile Recorder, which allows understanding Swift app performance without special system privileges.

You can collect log files through curl. It supports multiple industry-standard formats and can integrate with existing visualization and analysis tools.

🔒 Secure your app with Memory Integrity Enforcement | Meet with Apple

The A19 chip series has a new memory security feature. If your app is of a type that’s easily attacked (e.g., messaging, social, browser), you can enable Hardware Memory Tagging in Xcode 26 to detect potential issues.

🎵James Dempsey’s New Song Liquid Glass

Senior engineer James Dempsey has written and performed many songs using various Apple technologies. This is his latest.

The intentionally incomprehensible lyrics are deliberate. Why? Just like when Liquid Glass first launched, there were some issues with text being unclear.

💼The Underdogs: BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) | Apple at Work

After years, Apple at Work has released a new commercial. This time it’s about Windows’ blue screen of death. Over 8 minutes long, but just as lively and entertaining as always.

📱How iPhone 4 “Fixed” Antennagate

Developer @samhenrigold dug into how Apple fixed “Antennagate”—the signal degradation caused by touching the iPhone 4 antenna seam with your finger.

The answer might be much simpler than you think. From iOS 4 to 4.0.1, they modified 20 bytes and “fixed it.”

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you’ve been too busy to read last week’s content, here are the highlights:

• 🤖Code Along with Foundation Models Apple released the latest Foundation Models tutorial video

• 🚀Swift Transformers 1.0 Hugging Face officially released, making it easier for developers to use local AI models on Apple platforms

• 🛠️Swift Configuration Swift officially introduces a new solution for managing settings and environments

That’s all for this week’s Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Please subscribe to 13+ Premium Column to support my writing, thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

From the A19 Pro hardware performance, Foundation Models official launch, Swift Transformers 1.0 release, and more, I truly feel that the era of running AI models on iPhone has arrived. At least the difficulty of developing local AI applications is rapidly decreasing.

What do you think?

13 on September 30, 2025

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

Final reminder: 13+ annual plan offer available until today.

Offering an annual plan represents my commitment to continue writing for another year, which is a very serious consideration. If you want to subscribe, don’t miss out.

👉Start Your Learning Journey for the Next Year (click here to open Patreon).

Last week’s ⚡️Exploring iPhone USB Speed Impact on Development Experience series, the fifth article “AI Models Need High-Speed Transfer“ is the most important.

Starting with the iPhone 17 generation, running AI models on device has shifted from feasible to practical. Developing AI applications requires frequent transfer of multi-GB models, and speed bottlenecks will be a brand new challenge for workflows and development efficiency.

• Introduction

• How to Know Connection Speed

• Methods for Testing USB Speed

• Demonstrating Common Development Scenarios

• AI Models Need High-Speed Transfer

Plus monthly review and a development habits reminder:

• 🗓️13+ Usage Guide and September 2025 Theme Review

• 💡Good Development Habits: Reading Release Notes From a small pitfall in Apple documentation, emphasizing the importance of reading Release Notes for avoiding issues

🤖Code Along with Foundation Models

Foundation Models changed a lot during beta, making the WWDC25 video outdated.

This week Apple released the latest Code Along video.

Bonus: Apple press release introducing many real-world app cases using Foundation Models.

Traditional Chinese Apple Intelligence is available in iOS 26.1 beta 1, making now a great time to get started with Foundation Models.

🚀Swift Transformers 1.0

The very night I published the article AI Models Need High-Speed Transfer, Hugging Face announced the official release of Swift Transformers 1.0 and outlined future development.

This package aims to reduce the hassle for developers using local AI models on Apple platforms, filling gaps in Core ML and MLX. It can be said to be an essential tool for running third-party open-source AI models on Apple platforms.

In my view, Swift Transformers and Foundation Models share similar essence—both make it easier for developers to use AI models in Apple platform apps.

It has three main components:

• Tokenizers: Tools for preparing input parameters for models

• Hub: Tools for downloading and managing models

• Models and Generation: Wrappers for LLMs converted to Core ML format

Version 1.0 also includes many key updates, including more independent modular design, Swift Jinja integration, and full Swift 6 support.

🛠️Swift Configuration

Many developers should be happy—Swift officially introduces a new solution for managing settings and environments. I think this is something with limitless potential.

There’s one “small downside”—iOS requires 18 or above.

🧩SE-0494 Add isIdentical(to:) Methods for Quick Comparisons to Concrete Types

New proposal for isIdentical(to:) methods, enabling O(1) comparisons for container types like Array/String/Dictionary.

kemchenj’s tweet provides a simple explanation.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you’ve been too busy to read last week’s content, here are the highlights:

• 🚀Swift 6.2 Released

• 📦SQLiteData 1.0: Point-Free’s CloudKit Sync Solution

• 🇯🇵The all-new Apple Ginza opens this Friday, September 26, in Tokyo

That’s all for this week’s Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Please subscribe to 13+ Premium Column to support my writing, thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

13+ celebrates its first anniversary!

This year, I wrote 82 articles. Even I’m surprised by this number, but this is the power of continuous accumulation.

Recently I even started challenging myself to update every weekday, hoping readers have new articles to read every Monday through Friday morning.

On this first anniversary, I examined my writing state and feel I can write for at least another year, so I’m opening the annual plan for a limited time until September 30 as my commitment to continue writing.

Apple Developer Weekly readers, please take this opportunity to start subscribing to 13+ and support my continued writing!

13 on September 25, 2025

🎂13+ Celebrates One Year! Now Is the Best Time to Start Subscribing

Why keep writing articles, even to the extent of daily weekday updates?

I want to create an experience of reading for a few minutes each morning to get intellectual stimulation. Because I believe learning can’t rely on shortcuts; it requires continuous accumulation. I write, you read, we grow together.

Let each of your days start with inspiration from five minutes of reading.

13+ annual plan limited time offer until September 30, subscribe now at Patreon!

One-year anniversary review and outlook series:

• 🎂13+ Celebrates One Year! Thank You, Old Friends

• 🗓️The Meaning of 13+’s Daily Update Challenge for You and Me

• ➕13+ One Year Anniversary, Start Your Daily 5-Minute Inspiration Journey

This week’s ongoing “⚡️Exploring iPhone USB Speed Impact on Development Experience” series is very practical for iOS developers. Because I said on social media:

In case anyone doesn’t know

iPhone Air and 17 are both unsuitable as development machines

They only have USB 2.0

Developers should buy Pro

This attracted various responses, so let’s discuss with actual test data:

• Introduction

• How to Know Connection Speed

• Methods for Testing USB Speed

• Demonstrating Common Development Scenarios

Preview: Tomorrow’s article is the 5th in the series, titled “AI Models Need High-Speed Transfer“, which might change your perspective on iPhone I/O requirements.

🧪Apple Releases

• iOS 26.1 beta (23B5044l) includes Traditional Chinese Apple Intelligence. I tried it for a few days and find the writing tools most useful. Also, Siri’s operations integrated with personal ChatGPT account, allowing continued conversations in apps, is very convenient

• macOS 26.1 beta (25B5042k)

• tvOS 26.1 beta (23J5543j)

• visionOS 26.1 beta (23N5013j)

• watchOS 26.1 beta (23S5002i)

• Xcode 26.0 (17A324), 26.0.1 (17A400), 26.1 beta 1 (17B5025f)

If you’ve upgraded to macOS 26, you can try the Coding Assistant feature in Xcode 26. If you have ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions, you can log in for higher quotas and use APIs, including self-hosted local model servers.

• TN3115: Bluetooth State Restoration app relaunch rules article updated for iOS 26 features

🚀Swift 6.2 Released

Released alongside Xcode 26 is Swift 6.2. Features dozens of new capabilities including Approachable Concurrency and Safe Systems Programming.

Previous newsletters have featured Paul Hudson’s What’s new in Swift 6.2, which you can reference alongside this.

🛠️Xcodes 3.0 Officially Released

Xcode version management tool Xcodes released version 3.0. This version’s main update is supporting Xcode 26 split into Universal and Apple Silicon versions.

📦SQLiteData 1.0: Point-Free’s CloudKit Sync Solution

Point-Free’s SwiftData alternative now supports CloudKit sync and sharing. This library was formerly called SharingGRDB. I’ve been waiting for this for months!

📦swift-platform-executors

Apple’s new open-source package providing native execution mechanisms for Swift Concurrency across different platforms. Supports Apple’s own platforms, Linux, and Windows without depending on Dispatch or Foundation.

🔗Apple Shortcuts May Support MCP

Signs of MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration found in macOS Tahoe 26.1 beta 1. May be added to App Intents.

📝Hokila’s iOSDC 2025 Attendance Experience

iOSDC is the conference that inspired iPlayground, and Hokila is iPlayground’s founder and current organizer. Years later, returning to iOSDC for another “inspection” makes this article series very valuable for reference:

• How to Survive a Pure Japanese Conference Without Speaking Japanese

• Japan’s Fierce Pursuit of Software Engineers Shocked Me

• Looking at iOSDC’s Success from a Conference Organizer’s Perspective

🏷️Badge.io Supports Swift Package Concurrency Mode

You can now display Concurrency mode badges on Swift package repos, for example: https://img.shields.io/badge/Concurrency_Mode-Strict-orange

🇯🇵The all-new Apple Ginza opens this Friday, September 26, in Tokyo

The Ginza store was Apple’s first retail store outside the US, reopening after years of renovation. The Ginza store was also the first Apple Store I ever visited in my life. Hope to visit again in the near future.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you’ve been too busy to read last week’s content, here are the highlights:

• 🔒A19 Series Processor Memory Safety Features

• 📦Mattt Collaborates with Hugging Face

• 🤝iPlayground Experience Articles Collection

That’s all for this week’s Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Please subscribe to 13+ Premium Column to support my writing, thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

I believe this year's iPhone full lineup, for most people, the most noticeable upgrade should be the Center Stage front camera.

iPhone 17 has ProMotion, AOD, fast charging and other Pro features trickled down, with such comprehensive specs, it's practically flawless.

And the 17 Pro series, with improved heat dissipation, should be able to fully unleash the A19 Pro's performance potential.

However, for me, the most interesting is definitely the iPhone Air. Things made under extreme constraints are the most fun.

By the way, did you know that 13+ Premium Column is about to celebrate its first anniversary? Please look forward to the anniversary review and outlook to be published later this week.

13 on September 15, 2025

Apple New Product Launch Press Releases

• Introducing AirPods Pro 3, the ultimate audio experience

• Apple introduces Apple Watch SE 3

• Introducing Apple Watch Ultra 3

• Apple debuts Apple Watch Series 11, featuring groundbreaking health insights

• Apple announces Final Cut Camera 2.0

• Introducing iPhone Air, a powerful new iPhone with a breakthrough design

• Apple debuts iPhone 17

• Apple unveils iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, the most powerful and advanced Pro models ever

🧪Apple Releases & News

• Xcode 26 RC (17A321)

• iOS 26 RC (23A340), iOS 18.7 RC (22H20), iOS 16.7.12 RC (20H364), iOS 15.8.5 RC (19H394)

• macOS 26 RC (25A353)

• tvOS 26 RC (23J352)

• visionOS 26 RC (23M336)

• watchOS 26 RC (23R351)

• App Store submissions now open for the latest OS releases

• TN3192: Migrating your iPad app from the deprecated UIRequiresFullScreen key This is an expected requirement. Many iPad apps should still be forcing full screen, need to handle this soon

• Apple Design Resources: New product bezels

📱iOS 26 RC Supports Automatic Theme Color Adjustment with Official Cases

iOS 26 RC can automatically adjust theme colors when paired with official cases, bringing a more personalized experience to the system interface.

🔒A19 Series Processor Memory Safety Features

Apple added MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) technology to the A19 series processors, claiming it's "the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems." This technology combines hardware and software, fundamentally changing how iPhone protects itself.

Interested readers can refer to Apple's official security research paper.

📦Mattt Collaborates with Hugging Face

Mattt announced collaboration with Hugging Face to make it easier for iOS developers to integrate AI models into apps, developing Swift packages and writing guides.

If you've used Foundation Models, you know its APIs are great, but expecting all users' devices to support and enable Apple Intelligence isn't realistic. If third-party local models can be simplified for easy integration into iOS apps as Mattt mentioned, I think it's a big deal for iOS developers.

📺Apple VP Interview with Tom's Guide

Tom's Guide interviewed Apple VPs discussing challenges facing the new iPhone.

Joz threw the iPhone Air to the host across two seats and let him try bending it live, showing Apple's extreme confidence in this product.

The second half of this interview is on TechRadar's channel:

📊Geekbench iPhone 17 Series Performance Scores

Geekbench performance test results for A19 series SoCs are gradually becoming available.

🤝Taiwan iOS Developer Community Events

• iPlayground Experience Articles Collection: A collection of experience article links from iPlayground 2025 attendees, including participation experiences from participants, speakers, and staff from various perspectives. You can start with organizer hokila's experience article

• CocoaHeads Taipei September Meetup Recording: The complete recording of CocoaHeads Taipei's September meetup is now online. zonble introduced macOS Accessibility. I reported on his article last week, but hearing him speak is more interesting

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

I continue writing for the 13+ premium column. Here are some recent articles, welcome to subscribe and support.

Swift Dependencies recommendation series:

• 📦Swift Package Recommendation: Swift Dependencies Is Amazing. What Problems Does It Solve?

• 🕕Time Seems Simple but Is Hard to Test, Let Swift Dependencies Save the Day

• 🔀UUID's Randomness Is Good, Leave Testing Difficulties to Swift Dependencies

• 📦Solving SwiftSyntax's Extremely Slow Compilation Issue

Apple current events commentary and reminders:

• 🌬️Discussing "Upgrade Feel" from Apple's September 2025 Event

• 💸iOS 26 Is Coming, Are You Ready?

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 🎥ChaoCode's iOS 26 UI Series Videos Highly Recommended

• 🚪Prank Project Using MacBook Screen Hinge Angle Sensor

• 💼iOS and Android Job Crawler Bot

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Please subscribe to 13+ Premium Column to support my writing, thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

Indie development team Team Cherry's "Hollow Knight" is my favorite game, and I own a copy on every gaming platform, including the Mac version.

Its sequel "Hollow Knight: Silksong" finally launched last week after years of meticulous development by the three developers, causing such a momentum that it even crashed Steam.

After purchasing and downloading it, I experienced incredibly smooth combat and beautiful visuals on Mac - everything as moving and captivating as the original "Hollow Knight."

"Silksong" has a higher difficulty level, so I recommend those who haven't played the predecessor to go back and play "Hollow Knight" first.

Additionally, I personally believe that given these two games' performance on Mac, Apple should negotiate with Team Cherry to bring them to iOS. iPhone screens are too small, but they should work great on iPad. Of course, with a controller.

13 on September 8, 2025

🎬Apple Fall Event Countdown

Apple's fall event is about to begin at 1:00 AM Taiwan time on September 10! The official YouTube livestream is also ready.

• Official event page

• YouTube livestream link

🧪Apple Releases

• iOS 26 beta 9 (23A5336a)

• macOS 26 beta 9 (25A5351b)

• tvOS 26 beta 9 (23J5351a)

• visionOS 26 beta 9 (23M5335b)

• watchOS 26 beta 9 (23R5350b)

• TN3106: Customizing the appearance of UINavigationBar updated with iOS 26 related new designs

🎥ChaoCode's iOS 26 UI Series Videos Highly Recommended

ChaoCode has launched the "iOS 26 UI Update Introduction" series, currently member-exclusive content.

For friends (including myself) who are scrambling to study Liquid Glass at the last minute before iOS 26 launches, this is extremely useful. I recommend everyone subscribe to ChaoCode membership.

Already published content:

• iOS 26 UI: Sheet Background & Transition Effects Adjustments

• iOS 26 UI: TabView's New Style and APIs

• iOS 26 UI: Toolbar's New Style and APIs

The entire series will have at least three more videos, which is exciting.

🤖Alex Sidebar Team Joins OpenAI

Xcode AI tool Alex Sidebar announced they will no longer release new feature updates as the development team has joined OpenAI. Future integration directions have not yet been announced.

📱Instagram Finally Launches iPad Version

After 15 years of waiting, Instagram finally officially supports iPad, no longer just an enlarged iPhone version.

🔧macOS Accessibility──zonble

zonble shared a technical article about implementing macOS Accessibility technology in McBopomofo Input Method (I've been a user for over 10 years). The technical challenges are much greater than on iOS.

zonble even dug out some databases that macOS's built-in input method uses to achieve effects like making VoiceOver read "終於的終" (zhōng yú de zhōng) and "忠誠的忠" (zhōng chéng de zhōng).

🚪Prank Project Using MacBook Screen Hinge Angle Sensor

MacBook screen hinges have angle sensors. Although there's no public API, they can be read through technical means for interesting applications.

Developer @samhenrigold made it produce the sound of opening an ancient wooden door😂

Open source project here: https://github.com/samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor

💼iOS and Android Job Crawler Bot

ZhgChgLi developed a Telegram bot that crawls iOS and Android job postings, automatically collecting and pushing relevant job information.

🕸️Hollow Knight: Silksong Launches, Supports Mac with Excellent Performance

As mentioned in "From 13," I bought the Steam version. On Mac mini M4, it can achieve an excellent 4K@144fps experience.

And it only costs NT$328.

Unfortunately, this generation currently only has Simplified Chinese, and many places are widely considered poorly translated.

🇹🇼Taiwan iOS Developer Community Expands to Threads

I previously created and maintained a Twitter list of Taiwan iOS developers, and now I'm also collecting Taiwan iOS developers on Threads, making it easier for everyone to find peers.

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

Starting this week, I'll be gradually publishing the "📦Swift Package Recommendation: Swift Dependencies" series on 13+.

Swift Dependencies is my most frequently used package. It makes external conditions completely controllable, solving the problems of difficult testing and slow SwiftUI Preview compilation. After using it, my skills in distinguishing component responsibilities and designing tests have greatly improved.

If you don't want to miss this series of exciting technical recommendation articles, please subscribe to 13+.

Over the past two weeks, coinciding with iPlayground 2025, I completed the "Conference Series," totaling 10 articles covering everything from pre-event preparation to post-event reviews, recommendation reasons, and small stories. The content is quite rich. Some articles are freely available, and I welcome friends who enjoy them to subscribe and support.

Why attend conferences? 😇Why Attend Tech Conferences provides several practical reasons, including breaking out of routine states, understanding your technical skills and positioning, and gaining unexpected benefits. I also shared 😇Three Small Stories from Attending Conferences, and my observations over the years about 🇯🇵iPlayground and Japan iOS Conference Cross-Border Sparks (I consider this article quite romantic).

Practical guides: 😇Be Prepared to Make Conferences More Fun is a good introductory article, while 👋Conference Survival Tips for Engineers Who Aren't Good at Socializing should be helpful for more introverted friends.

Technical highlights: 📲iPlayground Open Source App Background Story shares some technical details used, while 📖Why Now Is the Best Time to Learn TCA? is a TCA recommendation article.

Behind-the-scenes speaker observations: Additionally, I observed that "people often perform better under certain constraints." This is written in 🗜️Only Give Me 20 Minutes? Constraints Actually Create Excellence.

Finally, my role as the closing speaker at this iPlayground and the topic selection had special intentions. For details, please see 💪Why I Chose "The Personal Software Era" as My iPlayground Closing Topic.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 🎨The Design Story Behind Xcode Diff View's Purple-Orange Color Scheme

• 👀Apple FastVLM Models Land on Hugging Face

• 📚New Tool to Solve Apple Documentation AI Reading Issues

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month? You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

iPlayground concluded successfully on Sunday, but developers don't have much time to rest. Apple's product event is coming soon.

I've been trying to challenge myself to publish articles on 13+ every weekday. Recently covered some interesting stories, don't miss them!

13 on September 2, 2025

🤩Apple Event Confirmed for September 10, 1:00-3:00 AM Taiwan Time

Apple's fall event time is confirmed! Expected to unveil the new generation iPhone, Apple Watch, and other products. The tagline is Awe Dropping. Will there be something amazing?

The preview page's logo creates an effect similar to thermal imaging, which you can interact with using your cursor or touch - go give it a try! After developers reverse-engineered it, they found it was made using Three.js shaders.

🧪Apple Releases

• Xcode 26 beta 7 is now available. As previewed last week, this version supports Claude Sonnet 4. Rudrank Riyam, familiar with various AI development tools, shared his experience

🎨The Design Story Behind Xcode Diff View's Purple-Orange Color Scheme

Former Apple designer Edward Sanchez personally explained the design origins of the purple and orange color scheme in Xcode's diff view.

👀Apple FastVLM Models Land on Hugging Face

Apple has released three versions of FastVLM real-time vision-language models - 0.5B, 1.5B, and 7B - supporting WebGPU:

• We introduce FastViTHD, a novel hybrid vision encoder designed to output fewer tokens and significantly reduce encoding time for high-resolution images.

• Our smallest variant outperforms LLaVA-OneVision-0.5B with 85x faster Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) and 3.4x smaller vision encoder.

• Our larger variants using Qwen2-7B LLM outperform recent works like Cambrian-1-8B while using a single image encoder with a 7.9x faster TTFT.

• There's a WebGPU demo site that supports browser display (Safari not supported)

📚New Tool to Solve Apple Documentation AI Reading Issues

Apple's JS-rendered documentation prevents AI tools from reading correctly. Mattt created sosumi.ai. Simply replace developer.apple.com in the documentation URL with sosumi.ai to get clean, AI-readable Markdown format.

Another alternative is Peter Steinberger's llm.codes.

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

I continue to write for the 13+ paid column. Welcome to subscribe and support.

Recent topics are all conference-related, but not limited to iPlayground.

• 😇Three Small Stories from Attending Conferences Attending tech conferences is an exclusive enjoyment for peers, a highlight in career activities. There are many iOS international conferences in Asia - consider scheduling them as annual fixed events!

• 📲iPlayground Open Source App Background Story This year at iPlayground, I volunteered to take on iOS app development. I think the stories behind the development are worth sharing, so I wrote this article.

• 👋Conference Survival Tips for Engineers Who Aren't Good at Socializing Even if you're not good at chatting in real life, you can still enjoy conference interactions. Just do a little preparation! Regardless of social skills, the preparation discussed in this article applies to everyone.

• 😇Be Prepared to Make Conferences More Fun Download the official app, preview the schedule and transportation info, arrive early, and enjoy the two-day event with a pleasant mood!

• 💪Why I Chose "The Personal Software Era" as My iPlayground Closing Topic My intention was simple: seeing that many people have "AI anxiety" in this era, I wanted to give a closing talk that would ease everyone's AI anxiety.

• 🗜️Only Give Me 20 Minutes? Constraints Actually Create Excellence Challenging yourself to express an idea in one sentence is painful, but it forces you to truly think and learn more deeply.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 🔄Former Flutter Engineering Team Lead Todd Volkert Joins Apple SwiftUI Team

• 📱Cook Gave Trump a Transparent iPhone Prototype──zonble

• 🤝Swift Taichung Community Introduction

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month?You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

iOS 26 beta 8 is out! But Xcode 26 is still on beta 6. Actually, the Release Notes don't show what was updated in beta 8.

I've been incredibly busy lately, developing the iPlayground iOS app on one hand and preparing my own presentation on the other.

There's also 13+ articles, which will have several pieces this week about conference experiences. However, the most popular article right now is about My AI Tools Usage Status (August 2025).

See you this weekend for those attending iPlayground!

13 on August 26, 2025

📅iPlayground Pre-Conference Notice

iPlayground Conference is coming soon! The pre-conference notice has been published, including venue information, schedule arrangements, and other important details. Friends preparing to attend should read the relevant information carefully.

Once again, the venue NCCU Center for Public and Business Administration Education is located on Jinhua Street, near Dongmen or Guting MRT stations - don't go to the wrong place!

🧪Apple Releases and News

• iOS 26 beta 8 (23A5330a)

• macOS 26 beta 8 (25A5349a)

• tvOS 26 beta 8 (23J5348a)

• visionOS 26 beta 8 (23M5332a)

• watchOS 26 beta 8 (23R5350a)

• Reminder: The recent security update for iOS 18.6.2 is quite important, users are recommended to update as soon as possible to ensure security

• Design kit: Added Figma versions of visionOS and watchOS design kits

🔄Former Flutter Engineering Team Lead Todd Volkert Joins Apple SwiftUI Team

Former Flutter engineering team lead Todd Volkert has officially joined Apple's SwiftUI team. What changes will this bring to the future of both frameworks?

🎓NTU x Apple RTC 114-1 Semester Course and Workshop Information

National Taiwan University and Apple Regional Training Center have announced course and workshop information for the 114-1 semester. These courses cover various aspects of iOS development and are great opportunities for those wanting to deeply learn Apple platform development.

📱Cook Gave Trump a Transparent iPhone Prototype──zonble

zonble told a wonderful story.

🤝Swift Taichung Community Introduction

Swift Taichung meetups have been held monthly since 2024, creating an exchange platform for iOS developers in central Taiwan. Friends with ideas and technical skills are welcome to participate.

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

I continue to write for the 13+ paid column. Here are some recent articles. Welcome to subscribe and support.

• 🤖My AI Tools Usage Status (August 2025) Updates on my current AI tools usage status for readers' reference.

• 🤝Constructive Communication with AI Applying team management communication habits to AI tools. Every failure is a learning opportunity, establishing guidelines to make collaboration increasingly efficient.

• 😇Why Attend Tech Conferences Attending conferences isn't about paying to take classes, but about the activity experience that only fellow developers can share together.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 📝What's New in UIKit──Seb Vidal

• 🤖Xcode 26 beta 6 Shows Traces of Claude AI Integration

• ⏰iOS Alarm Time Setting Picker Isn't Infinite

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month?You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

Apple is really pushing hard - beta releases for 4 consecutive weeks.

I only installed iPadOS 26 on my iPad mini. It feels very smooth and comfortable. It feels like a finished product already. Could this year be an upgrade with minimal pain?

Not much news worth mentioning this week, so I accumulated content for a few days before publishing.

Although there have been quite a few Apple new product rumors lately (exciting!), I'll wait until there's concrete news to share.

13 on August 21, 2025

🧪Apple Releases and News

• Xcode 26 beta 6 (17A5305f)

• iOS 26 beta 7 (23A5326a)

• macOS 26 beta 7 (25A5346a)

• tvOS 26 beta 7 (23J5346a)

• visionOS 26 beta 7 (23M5328a)

• watchOS 26 beta 7 (23R5346a)

• TN3134: Network Extension provider deployment article updated

🤩iPlayground Enters Final Countdown

The annual iPlayground will be held on August 30-31 at NCCU Center for Public and Business Administration Education.

Many friends think the venue is at the main NCCU campus, so I want to remind you that it's on Jinhua Street, near Dongmen or Guting MRT stations - don't go to the wrong place!

For those who haven't bought tickets yet, please seize this last opportunity!

I also livestreamed the development process of the iPlayground iOS App this week. The videos are quite long, so please skip around:

• #4 🗓️ Schedule Screen

• #5 🧪 AI Writing Tests, Setting up CI

📝What's New in UIKit──Seb Vidal

Seb Vidal wrote a comprehensive overview of UIKit 26's new features. Many readers hope Apple's update documentation could be as clear as this article.

🤖Xcode 26 beta 6 Shows Traces of Claude AI Integration

9to5Mac reports that some traces of Claude AI integration were found in Xcode 26 beta 6, although not yet fully enabled.

⏰iOS Alarm Time Setting Picker Isn't Infinite

Users discovered that the iOS alarm time picker isn't infinitely scrollable - you can scroll to the bottom. I couldn't find the original discovery post; this link is a demonstration video.

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

I continue to write for the 13+ paid column. Here are some recent articles. Welcome to subscribe and support.

• 🔧Building Rapid Feedback Systems is a Worthwhile Investment In my previous article, I talked about how getting quick feedback is key to efficient learning. But having principles isn't enough - you need to turn it into a system.

• 🔍Seeking Negative Feedback to Reduce Error Risk You know that AI often provides "hallucinations." Let me tell you how to effectively use its knowledge without being deceived.

• 🤔Planning Mode Isn't Exclusive to AI The work mode of planning before execution isn't actually exclusive to AI, but rather a common working method for professional knowledge workers.

• 🧩Breaking Down Tasks to Executable Level Often, when you feel you can't do something, it's not because it's truly difficult, but just because it looks difficult.

• 🚀Taking Action to Change State A wonderful connection from technical frameworks to life philosophy.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 💼Taiwan Education Startup Recruitment: 刷刷庫 Team Seeking Technical Partners

• 🔍iPadOS 26 Preview App's Adorable Magnifying Glass

• 📄Xcode 26 Beta 5 Hidden Markdown Documents

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month? You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

To match Apple's weekly beta release schedule, the newsletter is delayed again. This week's beta 6 feels much more complete, with many operations responding very quickly. Looking forward to the official release.

I'm very happy that this issue is sponsored by the Taiwan team behind "刷刷庫" (a TOEIC exam preparation app). There's information about their team recruitment below, please feel free to check it out.

13 on August 13, 2025

💼Taiwan Education Startup Recruitment: 刷刷庫 Team Seeking Technical Partners

刷刷庫 (a TOEIC exam preparation app) was launched by a team of two Taiwanese YouTubers, Columbus and Lily. It's already profitable on the App Store and continues to grow.

Since the current outsourced development team is shifting their focus and can no longer continue, the two founders are seeking new technical teams and collaboration methods.

They hope for two types of collaboration:

1. Hiring a CTO to build an internal team

2. Finding a suitable outsourcing team

The overall technical requirements equal the workload of one full-time iOS engineer plus one full-time Android engineer.

For detailed collaboration terms, salary packages, product status and other information, please click here to learn more.

I sincerely hope this exposure will help the team find their ideal technical partners to continue advancing this already successful educational product (regardless of sponsorship).

First, because I rarely hear success stories from Taiwan's mobile startup teams, and I hope to help. Second, because I come from an educational background myself. Third, because we're both content creators (though they're both approaching a million subscribers - I can't compare at all). Most importantly, after running this newsletter for so many years, it's rare to have developers who know to reach out to me for help.

Have readers ever wondered why 13 continues writing this newsletter? Actually, I didn't think too much about it at the beginning - I just hoped busy friends could quickly get new knowledge every week. Over the years, the newsletter has grown to over 2,700 subscribers, mostly from Taiwan, making me increasingly believe that this newsletter is the information source that the most iOS developers in Taiwan will see.

So I started looking forward to whether Taiwan developers would contact me to promote their work, or for other collaborations? Today, I finally got what I was waiting for. If any developer gains some opportunities for success through exposure in this newsletter, I would feel very honored! And please don't be shy about reaching out.

🧪Apple Releases

• iOS 26 beta 6 (23A5318c)

• macOS 26 beta 6 (25A5338b)

• tvOS 26 beta 6 (23J5339a)

• visionOS 26 beta 6 (23M5322b)

• watchOS 26 beta 6 (23R5340a)

• Note: At the time of writing, Xcode 26 has not yet released beta 6

🎵iOS 26 Beta 6 Update Highlights

iOS 26 beta 6 brings impressive updates:

First are the app opening/closing animations, catching up with the animation effects from iPadOS 26 beta 5 - very fast and smooth, the whole experience feels great.

Additionally, 7 new ringtones were added, including 6 variations of "Reflection" and the brand new "Little Bird". Many people online say Dreamersounds really nice. Of course, many people like me are permanently on silent mode and can't enjoy them.

Finally, after installation, there are new onboarding guide steps, including hint animations featuring Liquid Glass characteristics.

🔍iPadOS 26 Preview App's Adorable Magnifying Glass

iPadOS 26's Preview app added a magnifying glass feature that doesn't seem to have any practical use, but it's so cute - I'm in love with it.

That magnifying glass is actually for looking at traditional film negatives. One of my family members who is a photographer happens to use it daily, so I asked her to provide a short demo video.

📄Xcode 26 Beta 5 Hidden Markdown Documents

Xcode 26 beta 5 hides some markdown format document files, originally intended to help Xcode's own AI tools learn new WWDC APIs. But we can also proactively extract them for our own AI tools to read!

The path is /Applications/Xcode-beta.app/Contents/PlugIns/IDEIntelligenceChat.framework/Versions/A/Resources/AdditionalDocumentation.

🤖AI Tools: GPT-5 Debuts, Claude Adds Memory Feature

OpenAI officially launched GPT-5, seemingly solving the past problem of ChatGPT having too many model choices. However, initially hiding all previous model options caused dissatisfaction among many existing users. Later, the 4o option was reopened.

On the other hand, Anthropic added a beta "Memory" feature to Claude this week, which can remember content from past conversations, essentially providing cross-conversation memory capabilities. I've always thought cross-conversation memory was a strength of the ChatGPT app, so now let's see how Claude performs.

💻Cursor Launches CLI (Beta)

Since I started using Claude Code, I've left the previously most popular AI editor Cursor on the side. I think many friends who actively use AI tools have also switched from Cursor to Claude Code.

Until this week, Cursor also launched a terminal tool - Cursor CLI. Interested friends might want to give it a try.

🚴‍♂️Apple Maps Taiwan Cycling Navigation Goes Live

Apple Maps has started providing cycling navigation in Taiwan, avoiding hills or busy routes! This is good news for friends who like cycling.

🗺️Apple Open Sources Embedding Atlas Tool

Apple open-sourced a tool called Embedding Atlas, specifically designed for interactive visualization of large embedding vectors. This tool allows developers to more intuitively understand and process embedding data in machine learning, making it a very practical tool for AI/ML developers.

(The above paragraph was written by AI for me - I don't understand it myself, haha.)

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

I continue to write for the 13+ paid column. Here are some recent articles. Welcome to subscribe and support.

• 🔄 Short Story: Having the Answer in Mind, Just Need to Say It Out

• 🔄 Short Story: Quick Feedback is Key to Efficient Learning

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are some highlights:

• ↔️Swift AsyncAlgorithms New Development Goal: Share Feature

• ⚠️Quinn "The Eskimo!" Important Reminder About Memory Mapping

• 👥Join iPlayground 2025!

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month? You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

Sorry, this week's newsletter is a few days late again due to my busy schedule, but it's just in time for beta 5.

Speaking of being busy, I want to share something small with you. I have a "project of projects" written with Claude Code that can read content from other software and writing projects to keep work records.

This project was originally called meta-project (a meta project, meaning a project of projects), but recently while organizing, I felt this name was too boring. After careful consideration, I renamed it to passion.

And the todos in the project, I renamed from todo to spark.

In other words, I use this name to remind myself that these are things I'm passionate about doing. I need to protect them.

One more important thing: I've renamed "iOS Developer+" to "13+" to better reflect the actual content. See the announcement articlefor details.

13 on August 7, 2025

🧪Apple Releases

• Xcode 26 beta 5 (17A5295f) Note: Starting from beta 5, separate versions for Apple Silicon and Intel, please choose the correct version when downloading

• iOS 26 beta 5 (23A5308g)

• iPadOS 26 beta 5 (23A5308g)

• macOS 26 beta 5 (25A5327h)

• tvOS 26 beta 5 (23J5327g)

• visionOS 26 beta 5 (23M5311g)

• watchOS 26 beta 5 (23R5328g)

🤖This Week's Major AI Model Updates

It's been a busy week in the AI field with multiple important models being released simultaneously. First, iOS 26 Beta 5 brings more new features to the Foundation Models framework. Apple engineer Erik Hornberger (@mopperson) shared a series of posts. With each beta version, Foundation Models has introduced many changes, making it arguably one of the frameworks Apple is most actively promoting.

OpenAI, long criticized for not being open at all, launched the gpt-oss series open source models, offering 120b and 20b versions, specifically designed to run on high-end laptops (like MacBook Pros with enough memory) and phones. Interested readers should download the models and give them a try.

Anthropic hasn't been idle either, releasing Claude Opus 4.1, further advancing AI coding capabilities. The official recommendation is to start using Opus 4.1 instead of 4.

🕳️Default Actor Isolation: New Problems from Good Intentions──fatbobman

Fatbobman published an in-depth article about Default Actor Isolation in Swift 6.2. A must-read for those who have started diving into Xcode 26 and Swift 6.2.

🚫@isolated(any)──NSHipster

Matt Massicotte introduces the easily overlooked @isolated(any) attribute on NSHipster. Worth exploring for those wanting deeper understanding of Swift actors.

↔️Swift AsyncAlgorithms New Development Goal: Share Feature

AsyncAlgorithms is great, but unfortunately updates infrequently. The new development goal focuses on the Share feature. It appears to address the limitation that AsyncSequence can only be consumed by a single receiver.

⚠️Quinn "The Eskimo!" Important Reminder About Memory Mapping

Apple's Technical Support Engineer Quinn "The Eskimo!" reminds developers on the Swift forums to be extra cautious when using memory mapping on Apple platforms. Memory mapping may be unsafe when target files are stored on volumes that might disappear (like external drives or network volumes).

👥Join iPlayground 2025!

Mandy shares her excitement and participation tips for the upcoming iPlayground 2025. As Taiwan's largest iOS developer conference, iPlayground is not just a venue for technical exchange but an important moment for the developer community to gather.

📺This Week's Developer Video Updates

Apple Developer released a recording from a live presentation in Cupertino "Explore the biggest updates from WWDC25". This approximately 100-minute video is perfect for developers who don't have time to watch all the WWDC content, condensing the key updates from the developer conference. You can also virtually experience Cupertino's Developer Center. As a veteran Apple developer, seeing this "traditional" recording format suddenly brings a nostalgic feeling.

ChaoCode also released two new videos: First is "Add AI Voice Chat Features to Your App with ElevenLabs Swift SDK! - Conversational AI", introducing how to add AI voice chat features to apps. The other is "A Failed Prototype Demo 🥲 - #BuildInPublic #Shipaton 2025", sharing the development process in BuildInPublic format, related to the ongoing RevenueCat Shipaton 2025 event.

I'm also continuing my iPlayground App development livestream recordings, with the latest episode being "iPlayground 2025 App #3 ⏬ Switching to Real SessionData", the fourth video in the playlist, continuing the iPlayground App development progress reported in last week's newsletter.

🚀Major Update: iOS Developer+ Officially Renamed to "13+"

I've renamed iOS Developer+, now called "13+". It might seem like "abandoning" iOS development at first glance, but actually, my writing focus has always been on AI tools, learning methods, and career thinking. The rename is a correction and a fresh start for my personal brand. Welcome to subscribe and share - non-iOS developers are also welcome. Thanks for your support!

➕13+ Recent Content Updates

Here are some recent articles. Welcome to subscribe and support.

• 🚀Major Update: iOS Developer+ Officially Renamed to "13+"

• 🤖You Should Have a Resume Project in Your ChatGPT Many people know resumes need careful preparation, but usually only start organizing when job hunting, forgetting important career highlights. You can actually use ChatGPT or Claude's project features to build a long-term collection system, recording work achievements as they happen, then using AI to help package them into business value and organize output when needed. This is both easy and effective, especially suitable for engineers to convert technical achievements into resume highlights.

• 🧠I Treat AI as Human to Reduce Cognitive and Learning Burden Treating AI tools as humans can reduce cognitive and learning burden. Sharing how I use intuition and management experience from human interaction to more effectively use AI tools.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 🤖Major Updates and Issues with Foundation Models in Beta 4 GenerationSchema supports Codable, but with known issues

• 📺My iOS Live Coding: iPlayground App Development Livestream and Recordings My YouTube livestream development process documentation

• 🧪iOS 26 beta 4 Officially Released Also the first Public Beta

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month?You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

Got super busy over the weekend and Monday, so the newsletter is a bit late this week.

By the way, can you tell which parts of this newsletter were written by Claude?

13 on July 29, 2025

🧪Apple Releases

• Xcode 26 beta 4 (17A5285i)

• iOS 26 beta 4 (23A5297i) Also the first Public Beta

• macOS 26 beta 4 (25A5316i)

• tvOS 26 beta 4 (23J5316g)

• visionOS 26 beta 4 (23M5300g)

• watchOS 26 beta 4 (23R5317g)

• TN3179: Understanding local network privacy Updated with clarifications for 2 bugs (rare to see bug descriptions in Tech Notes)

• TN3120: Expected use cases for Network Extension packet tunnel providers Updated content related to URL filters mechanism

🤖Major Updates and Issues with Foundation Models in Beta 4

Apple engineer Julian Schiavo shared important updates on Foundation Models: Starting from beta 4, GenerationSchema supports Codable and provides JSON Schema for @Generable model parameters. This means you can now use @Generable models with any LLM (like ChatGPT), not just Apple Foundation Models - a significant advance in interoperability.

We can see extensive bug fixes in the Release Notes, showing Apple's significant investment in Foundation Models.

However, on the other hand, Beta 4 also has major known issues. The Release Notes mention:

• Some instructions and prompts to the model might not lead to expected responses. (152318091)

• Tool calling might not function properly if primitive types such as Int, String, or Bool are used as the argument. (152318534)

These issues make some basic operations unusable in the current version. Renowned developer Natasha the Robot expressed frustration.

While I haven't deeply studied the Foundation Models framework yet, it's clear this framework is tied to system versions, unlike third-party AI models where you can freely choose versions. This leaves developers having to choose between downgrading to Beta 3 or waiting for the next fixed version to continue development. And this wait, following the beta release cycle, will be at least 2 weeks.

What I want to say is that it's clear Apple is working very hard on Foundation Models. It's just that expectations for Apple Intelligence from developers are already low, and developers willing to invest in research are all strong early supporters. I hope these development experience shortcomings can be minimized as much as possible.

⌚️Apple Watch Apps Will Require New watchOS 26 SDK

Starting April 2026, Apple Watch apps need to support 64-bit binaries, so they must be compiled using the watchOS 26 SDK.

Most Watch apps are bundled with iOS apps, and the corresponding iOS apps also need to use the version 26 SDK. In other words, developers working on Watch apps need to start using Xcode 26 before the above date.

However, previous years have also required using the latest Xcode version for uploads starting in April, so this doesn't disrupt the annual rhythm.

👀Xcode 26 Beta 4 Adds "Show View Hierarchy" Feature in SwiftUI Instruments

Xcode 26 Beta 4 added a useful "Show View Hierarchy" button in the SwiftUI instrument. Developers can now see view updates in the view hierarchy and understand where things are happening.

👶Apple Updates Age Rating System and Requires Developer Response

Apple sent emails to all developers announcing updates to the age rating system for apps and games. Important changes include:

• New 13+, 16+, 18+ ratings (previously only 4+ and 9+)

• New mandatory questions covering in-app controls, features, medical health themes, violent themes

• Developers must complete responses by January 31, 2026

💰IAP Retention Messaging API

Apple launched the IAP Retention Messaging Web API.

You can refer to IAP backend service RevenueCat's explanation. The main purpose is to enhance retention for subscription cancellations.

🎨Apple Launches Custom Apple Logo Wallpaper Website

Apple launched an official website allowing users to customize Apple logo wallpapers. Users can choose wallpaper styles, customize designs, and download their creations. The website's tagline is "Pick a wallpaper. Make it your own. Download your design."

Hoping for more patterns.

❓NSHipster New Article: Uncertain⟨T⟩

This is brilliant - implementing probabilistic uncertainty using Swift generics. Once again, Mattt's article has impressed me.

🤖Peter Pan: Developing Apps Using ChatGPT Agent That Operates Computers Like a Human

Peter Pan shares practical experience and tips on using ChatGPT agent that can operate computers like humans to develop apps.

Worth mentioning, iPlayground just open-sourced their session data, and Peter Pan used this data to experiment with directly creating an app. I think this is an excellent example of community interaction.

🎮Paul Hudson's Capture the Flag App

Hacking with Swift author Paul Hudson released what looks like a super fun Capture the Flag app. Completely made with SwiftUI, but the interface is highly customized like a game.

🌐Swift Erlang Actor System: Bringing Swift into Distributed Erlang Clusters

Developer carsonkatri shared an exciting new project on the Swift forums: swift-erlang-actor-system. This actor system allows Swift programs to join distributed Erlang clusters, bringing interoperability with the Erlang/OTP ecosystem to Swift's distributed actors.

To be honest, I have no idea what this does or how to use it, but it looks impressive.

📺My iOS Live Coding: iPlayground App Development Livestream and Recordings

Last week I started livestreaming iPlayground App development, probably my first time live coding on YouTube. I'm grateful that iPlayground always gives me opportunities to try new promotional tools (both the weak self podcast and the newsletter you're reading now originated from promoting iPlayground).

Currently accumulated 3 videos documenting the development (and crashes) process. Introducing development plans, environment and data preparation, getting started with AI tools. Overall development progress has just begun, interested friends are welcome to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

➕iOS Developer+ Recent Content Updates

I've been continuously writing for the iOS Developer+ paid column. Here are some recent articles. Welcome to subscribe and support.

• 🧠I Treat AI as Human to Reduce Cognitive and Learning Burden Treating AI tools as humans can reduce cognitive and learning burden. Sharing how I use intuition and management experience from human interaction to more effectively use AI tools.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 📢iPlayground 2025 Agenda and Speakers Officially Announced Taiwan's largest iOS developer conference complete agenda revealed

• 🎮Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition Mac Native Version Launched Important milestone for Apple Silicon Mac gaming platform

• 🏷️App Store Connect Adds App Tags Feature Helping users better understand app features

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month?You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

Readers might be wondering why 13's Developer Weekly has been on hiatus for a while again.

Actually, my biggest motivation for writing the newsletter is seeing news worth sharing. So when I don't see any important news all week, it becomes awkward when it's time to write - that's the main reason I didn't publish last week 😅

This week's newsletter mainly covers the iPlayground agenda announcement, some developer videos worth watching (including my livestream recordings!), and several games launching on Mac.

13 on July 22, 2025

📢iPlayground 2025 Agenda and Speakers Officially Announced

Taiwan's largest iOS developer conference, iPlayground 2025, has officially announced its complete agenda and speaker lineup. This year's themes cover advanced Swift techniques, architectural evolution and refactoring, AI integration development, diverse career development, and more rich content. Being able to gather with many developers is an unmissable annual event.

Get your tickets now!

📜Apple Releases Foundation Language Models Technical Report 2025

Apple published its 2025 Foundation Language Models technical report on the Machine Learning Research website, detailing the technical architecture and model design behind Apple Intelligence.

🎨Apple Provides iOS 26 Design Resources

iOS 26 now has design resources available for both Figma and Sketch. For macOS 26 Tahoe, only Sketch files are currently available.

🏷️App Store Connect Adds App Tags Feature

App Store Connect has added the ability to display App Tags on product pages. Tags are automatically generated from metadata, but developers can also manually add them. For example, health apps can display "Health & Fitness," "Training," "Wellness," etc., helping users better understand the app's functions and purposes. Currently, this feature is only supported in the US App Store, but we expect it will gradually expand to other regions.

🦻Apple Watch Sleep Apnea Notifications and AirPods Pro 2 Hearing Aid Features Officially Launch in Taiwan

Apple has received medical device approval from Taiwan's Ministry of Health and Welfare, officially launching Apple Watch sleep apnea notification features in Taiwan, as well as AirPods Pro 2's end-to-end hearing health experience, including clinically validated over-the-counter "hearing aid" functionality.

🎮Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition Mac Native Version Launched July 17

CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition Mac native version officially launched on July 17, including the Phantom Liberty DLC.

If you've already purchased this game on PC stores like Steam, GOG, or Epic Games Store, you'll automatically get the Mac version without needing to repurchase. The GOG version is DRM-free and currently on sale.

The game is also available on the Mac App Store. However, I don't recommend purchasing from MAS because, aside from no discounts, the main issue is it downloads voice packs for all languages, using several tens of GB of extra space.

CDPR provides free cross-platform cloud save functionality, so you can continue your game progress on home consoles (including the latest Switch 2), PC, and Mac.

Cyberpunk 2077 Mac version is an important milestone for Mac gaming development. Here are several reasons:

• Excellent performance with minimum hardware requirements of M1 and 16 GB RAM

• This game is often used for hardware performance comparisons, supports major gaming platforms, so it can serve as a Mac performance indicator

• CDPR was very thoughtful, providing a one-click optimal settings feature in the graphics settings that applies the best settings for your current Mac hardware ("This Mac")

• The official team stated that when macOS Tahoe is officially released, they'll update to use Metal 4, which should provide better graphics or performance

When Cyberpunk 2077 launched the Mac version, the game content was updated to version 2.3, adding many vehicles and gameplay features. Friends who have already purchased from PC stores might want to download the Mac version to try it out.

Personally, Mac certainly won't be the first choice gaming platform for many players (including myself), but CDPR launching Cyberpunk 2077 on Mac fully demonstrates that Mac hardware can run games smoothly and can have excellent port versions. Actually, Cyberpunk 2077 only launched on Nintendo Switch 2 platform last month and also showed excellent handheld performance.

In summary, I think current CDPR in the gaming industry is leading the way, showing other companies and players that "this can be done." I look forward to more high-quality games following this standard and launching on Mac.

👊Little Fighter 2 Remastered Lands on Steam with Mac Support

Another remastered game also launched at the same time with Mac platform support - "Little Fighter 2."

If you're a nostalgic old-school gamer, feel free to visit the Steam store to relive the memories.

📺ChaoCode Channel Recent Major Updates

Launched visionOS development series:

Icon Composer design icon pitfall experiences:

Shipaton thoughts discussion. The interaction between the two hosts is full of fun:

New partner Mia teaches everyone Shader Graph and Reality Composer Pro:

📺Harry's AI Coding Club Video

This episode "Using Claude Code to Develop iOS Apps in One Go" received enthusiastic reception:

📺 Nil Coalescing New Video

Nil Coalescing released a detailed tutorial on SwiftUI matched geometry:

📺 iOS Development Side Dish - iPlayground 2025 iOS App Development Special

Recently, I started livestreaming and recording the iPlayground iOS app development process, making heavy use of AI tools, using SwiftUI and TCA architecture.

The primary purpose of the livestream is to promote iPlayground and encourage everyone to buy tickets to attend the conference for mutual exchange.

Livestream is limited to 1080p, and recording time varies. I'll try to post-edit them into videos.

If you're interested in this series, you can join this Apple Invites to ensure you receive livestream-related news first.

Of course, feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel too!

✍️CI/CD Practical Guide (Part 3) - ZhgChgLi

Introduces how to implement App iOS CI and CD workflows using GitHub Actions.

I believe the best way to learn CI/CD is to set it up yourself once. ZhgChgLi's article will be excellent reference material.

➕iOS Developer+ Recent Content Updates

I've been continuously writing for the iOS Developer+ paid column. Here are some recent articles. Welcome to subscribe and support.

• ⛰️Four Things Worth Pursuing More in the AI Era The AI era has changed development game rules: writing tests went from "no time" to necessary practice, writing documentation went from burden to guidance, code reviews became more important, and personal taste became the key to determining output quality. Four development practices to reconsider, letting AI help you do more valuable work.

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 🚢RevenueCat Shipaton 2025 Developer competition with $300,000 USD total prize pool

• 📚onevcat's Swift Concurrency Book Updated to Swift 6 Meow God's book update, lamenting the situation of technical books in the large model era

• 🧪iOS 26 beta 3 Released Liquid Glass's glass effect reduced

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month?You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

This newsletter is a few days late because I decided to extend my vacation and was traveling without a good work environment. Plus, there was less developer news last week, so I took a few extra days to gather more content.

iOS 26 Beta 3 reduced the liquid effect of Liquid Glass so much that many people feel it's completely lost its impact. I guess they'll adjust it back in future beta versions.

13 on July 9, 2025

🚢RevenueCat Shipaton 2025

RevenueCat announced Shipaton 2025. This is a meaningful event that encourages developers to build and ship apps through various incentives. The total prize pool is worth $300,000 USD.

The iPlayground conference appears at the 204-second mark in the official video. Coincidentally, iPlayground's schedule overlaps with Shipaton this year, and RevenueCat is a sponsor, so there will be booth activities at the event.

ChaoCode also released a related introduction video and announced they're joining the competition.

As for me, I was too busy to participate last year. This year, I want to finally build and ship my own app. Welcome to join the fun!

🧪Apple Releases & News

• Xcode 26 beta 3 (17A5276g)

• iOS 26 beta 3 (23A5287g) In this version, the liquid effect of Liquid Glass has been significantly reduced. Wonder how they'll adjust it in future versions?

• iPadOS 26 beta 3 (23A5287g)

• macOS 26 beta 3 (25A5306g)

• tvOS 26 beta 3 (23J5306g)

• visionOS 26 beta 3 (23M5290f)

• watchOS 26 beta 3 (23R5307g)

• Updates for apps in the European Union The European Commission has required Apple to make a series of additional changes under the Digital Markets Act.

📚onevcat's Swift Concurrency Book Updated to Swift 6

onevcat announced that his book "Swift Concurrency" has been updated to Swift 6. His reflection in this tweet is worth savoring:

In the era of large language models, the format of technical books obviously can't keep up anymore. It feels like they'll eventually just become fodder for LLMs. As a human, I don't know whether to feel relieved or sad about this.

📖Paul Hudson's New Book Everything but the Code Launches July 14

Hacking with Swift author Paul Hudson is launching a new book, "Everything but the Code."

The book's concept is similar to my previous idea of an "iOS Developer Completion Plan" - covering all the developer knowledge beyond just writing code. But obviously, his content is much richer, and he's gathered insights from experts across various fields.

If you're interested, it'll be available for purchase next week.

🤖Foundation Models beta 3 Adds GeneratedContent API

I happened to notice SwiftUI team engineer Julian Schiavo sharing that Foundation Models added the GeneratedContent API in beta 3.

This lets you generate your @Generable models outside the FoundationModels framework, via JSON or other methods (here "models" refers to data objects, not language models 😂).

🎯Airbnb Tech Blog Shares Understanding and Improving SwiftUI Performance

The Airbnb engineering team shared their experience improving SwiftUI performance on their tech blog. For teams using SwiftUI to develop large-scale applications, this is excellent reference material.

➕iOS Developer+ Recent Content Updates

I've been continuously writing for the iOS Developer+ paid column. Here are some recent articles. Welcome to subscribe and support.

• 🔥Let's Play with Claude Code - iOS Development AI Assistant Tools #11

• 🔥🏃The Capable Overworked: Productivity Traps in the AI Era

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to read last week's content, here are the highlights:

• ✨ChaoCode Launches Foundation Models Video Series

• 🤖Google Launches Gemini CLI Open Source AI Agent

• 💪Swift Android Workgroup Established

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month?You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.

This week saw lots of new updates and contributions from Taiwan's developer community friends:

ChaoCode finally updated and launched memberships.

weak self podcast invited iPlayground organizer Hokila on the show. He said on the show: "A developer who specializes in a certain framework, even after a period of inactivity, can catch up to the latest developments in just two or three days", so he wrote an article about streaming technology.

Friends also contributed open source projects.

Everyone is welcome to contribute!

13 on June 30, 2025

✨ChaoCode Launches Foundation Models Video Series

Happy to see ChaoCode updating again. The latest series introduces Apple's Foundation Models framework, with three videos total. Here's the first one.

I was fortunate to preview it, and found the content very practical. Jane really is an expert in this area.

Don't treat Foundation Models as conversational chat LLMs, but rather make good use of their structured response capabilities to enhance app user experience.

Additionally, ChaoCode introduces new partners, shares future plans, and announces channel memberships in the video below. I joined immediately and encourage readers to support passionate creators with paid subscriptions!

🧪Apple Releases & News

• Xcode 26 beta 2 (17A5241o)

• iOS 26 beta 2 (23A5276f)

• iPadOS 26 beta 2 (23A5276f)

• macOS 26 beta 2 (25A5295e)

• tvOS 26 beta 2 (23J5295e)

• visionOS 26 beta 2 (23M5279f)

• watchOS 26 beta 2 (23R5296f)

• AirPods Firmware beta 2 (8A5293c)

• Updates for apps in the European Union

🤖Google Launches Gemini CLI Open Source AI Agent

Google joins the AI Agent CLI battlefield with the open source Gemini CLI tool. This allows developers to directly use Gemini models in the terminal for various development tasks or computer operations. It's currently free to use, though Gemini 2.5 Pro model usage is limited and will quickly downgrade to 2.5 Flash.

Since Claude Code is still superior for coding and Gemini CLI has a larger context window, some people share techniques for using Claude Code to call Gemini CLI. In my view, this is like having different employees do what they're good at to complete tasks together.

By the way, all major AI Agent CLIs are developed using the Ink framework.

💪Swift Android Workgroup Established

Swift cross-platform takes another step forward! The newly established workgroup will focus on improving Swift support on the Android platform.

📚Apple Documentation MCP: Let AI Query Apple Official Documentation Directly

Another practical MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool! This project allows AI Agents to directly query Apple's official documentation. I've played with it a bit and it should be part of my workflow.

📺Complete Guide from Traditional TS HLS to Modern Streaming Architecture with Multi-DRM Support—hokila

Hokila shares a complete guide to streaming technology, covering everything from basic HLS to advanced DRM support. Good reference material for developers who need to develop video streaming features.

🪙JupSwift: Native Solana Development SDK

An open source project contributed by community friends! This is a Swift SDK that allows iOS developers to natively integrate Solana blockchain, including:

• Mnemonic wallet module with Secure Enclave secure storage support

• Solana transaction signing and submission functionality

• Jupiter aggregator API integration

🎙️weak self podcast 112: The Capable Overwork—Claude Code Hands-on Experience

Sharing experiences using Claude Code, directly as the main pitch. Also emphasizing the importance of following your own life pace.

🎙️weak self podcast 113: Emotional Blackmail Ticket Sales feat. Hokila

Chatting with iPlayground organizer Hokila about the blood, sweat and tears of organizing events.

⚡️Quick Mentions

• 🎬How dare Apple promote their movie by literally printing its name on the Mac F1 movie, printing F1 on the keyboard...this is obviously a joke. But it makes me think there are memes everywhere in life, depending on your perspective.

• 🔐Safari has quite a few anti-fingerprinting tactics. Developer Jack Fields shares what he knows about Safari's anti-fingerprinting mechanisms.

➕iOS Developer+ Recent Content Updates

For advanced iOS developers, I continue writing the iOS Developer+ paid column. Below are recent articles, welcome to subscribe and support.

• 🔥🏃The Capable Overwork: The Productivity Trap in the AI Era

↖️Last Issue Highlights

If you've been too busy to check last week's content, here are the highlights:

• 🃏In Memory of Bill Atkinson, zonble Introduces HyperCard

• ⚠️iPlayground Call for Papers Reminder

• 🗣️Yap

That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.

The newsletter has always been free to read, with just occasional sponsors. Would you consider supporting me with $5 per month?You can also buy me some apples🍎 through Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.

For business collaborations or newsletter sponsorship, please refer to this page.