A new year has started and most of us are probably figuring out what we should focus on this year. Whether it’s learning new things or expanding our knowledge on topics we’ve already learned about in the past, there’s always something that deserves our attention in the world of iOS development. In this short post I’ve listed five things that I believe will help you become a better developer in 2022. Or rather, the first half of 2022. I’m fully expecting Apple to release some cool new interesting things at this year’s WWDC that deserve some of your attention in...

I’ve recently been working on a background uploading feature for an app. One of the key aspects to get right with a feature like that is to correctly handle scenarios where your app is suspended by the system due to RAM constraints or other, similar, reasons. Testing this is easily done by clearing the RAM memory on your device. Unfortunately, this isn’t straightforward. But it’s also not impossible. Note that opening the task switcher and force closing your app from there is not quite the same as forcing your app to be suspended. Or rather, it’s not the same as...

There's a good chance that you're using SwiftUI and that you're not quite sure how and when SwiftUI determines which views should redraw. And arguably, that's a good thing. SwiftUI is clearly smart enough to make decent decisions without any negative consequences. In fact, you might even have set up your app in a way that coincidentally plays into SwiftUI's strength beautifully. There's an equal likelihood that your setup isn't as performant as you might think but you're just not seeing any issues yet. Recently, I had to figure out how SwiftUI determines that it should redraw views in order...

The biggest features in Swift 5.5 all revolve around its new and improved concurrency features. There's actors, async/await, and more. With these features folks are wondering whether async/await will replace Combine eventually. While I overall do not think that async/await can or will replace Combine on its own, Swift 5.5 comes with some concurrency features that provide very similar functionality to Combine. If you're curious about my thoughts on Combine and async/await specifically, I still believe that what I wrote about this topic earlier is true. Async/await will be a great tool for work that have a clearly defined start...

Async/await will be the defacto way of doing asynchronous programming on iOS 15 and above. I've already written quite a bit about the new Swift Concurrency features, and there's still plenty to write about. In this post, I'm going to take a look at building an asynchronous image loader that has support for caching. SwiftUI on iOS 15 already has a component that allows us to load images from the network but it doesn't support caching (other than what’s already offered by URLSession), and it only works with a URL rather than also accepting a URLRequest. The component will be...

If you've worked with Combine in your applications you'll know what it means when I tell you that you should always retain your cancellables. Cancellables are an important part of working with Combine, similar to how disposables are an important part of working with RxSwift. Interestingly, Swift Concurrency's AsyncSequence operates without an equivalent to cancellable (with memory leaks as a result). That said, in this post we'll only focus on Combine. For example, you might have built a publisher that wraps CLLocationManagerDelegate and exposes the user's current location with a currentLocation publisher that's a CurrentValueSubject<CLLocation, Never>. Subscribing to this publisher...

One of my favorite concurrency problems to solve is building concurrency-proof token refresh flows. Refreshing authentication tokens is something that a lot of us deal with regularly, and doing it correctly can be a pretty challenging task. Especially when you want to make sure you only issue a single token refresh request even if multiple network calls encounter the need to refresh a token. Furthermore, you want to make sure that you automatically retry a request that failed due to a token expiration after you've obtained a new (valid) authentication token. I wrote about a flow that does this before,...

Earlier, I published a post on Swift Concurrency's task groups. If you haven't read that post yet, and you're not familiar with task groups, I recommend that you read that post first because I won't be explaining task groups in this post. Instead, you will learn about a technique that you can use to work around a limitation of task groups. Task groups can run a number of child tasks where every child task in the task group produces the same output. This is a hard requirement of the withTaskGroup function. This means that task groups are not the right...

In last week's post, I demonstrated how you can use a task group in Swift to concurrently run multiple tasks that produce the same output. This is useful when you're loading a bunch of images, or in any other case where you have a potentially undefined number of tasks to run, as long as you (somehow) make sure that every task in your group produces the same output. Unfortunately, this isn't always a reasonable thing to do. For example, you might already know that you only have a very limited, predetermined, number of tasks that you want to run. These...

With Apple's overhaul of how concurrency will work in Swift 5.5 and newer, we need to learn a lot of things from scratch. While we might have used DispatchQueue.async or other mechanisms to kick off multiple asynchronous tasks in the past, we shouldn't use these older concurrency tools in Swift's new concurrency model. Luckily, Swift Concurrency comes with many features already which means that for a lot of our old uses cases, a new paradigm exists. In this post, you will learn what Swift Concurrency's task groups are, and how you can use them to concurrently perform a lot of...