Apple Developer Weekly #250 M5 Launched, 26.1 Reaches beta 4
Swift SDK for Android Now Available
From 13
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 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 attitudeTN3193: 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
Member-exclusive videos:
💡Development Tips Spotted on Twitter
https://x.com/KyleSwifter/status/1979849200222531959 For SwiftUI performance, especially
ListandForEach, you can use theLogForEachSlowPathlaunch argument to see more warning logshttps://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
UIObservationTrackingEnabledin Info.plisthttps://x.com/gwenshap/status/1979414416258167142 Did you know? macOS has a built-in network speed test command, just type
networkqualityto run ithttps://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
That’s all for this week’s Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.
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