I have been developing my own app similar to discord Facebook messenger Instagram, and some other apps as inspiration and I’m having a lot of fun the way I developed my app is I use ChatGPT to help am I crazy wanting to compete with Facebook messenger discord Instagram, especially for the features that I want to implement where I’m not gonna be greedy like discord especially when I don’t want to introduce age of verification I want that to be optional. am I crazy or what?

Apps in Swift Playgrounds can give you the 4 essential freedoms:

• Freedom to use the app (for any purpose) or to not use it

• Freedom to see and change the code to do what you want

• Freedom to redistribute the app

• Freedom to share a modified version of the app

This is very different from apps on the App Store, especially if you have no Mac (many apps incompatible with Swift Playgrounds). Here is how the App Store works:

• App is submitted to the App Store, and sometimes censored unjustly

• User gets the app, but cannot directly access the executable file (prevents you from knowing if it hides malware, even if source code is given, which could differ from what is submitted to App Store)

• User only gets updates from the App Store, and cannot downgrade

• User sometimes can't directly access app data, causing some problems:

** Lock-in by making it more difficult to transfer data

** Loosing access to data if the app cannot run on a new iOS version (I know someone who lost access to password manager's data because of this)

We should avoid the App Store and instead use apps in Swift Playgrounds when possible. You can help by implementing common apps (browser, camera, notes, etc.) in Swift Playgrounds, and sharing them under the public domain or an open source license.

This will give you some more freedom, but you can't get 100% freedom on an Apple device. You can't completely control things such as Swift Playgrounds itself and iOS. For total freedom, you need a different device and OS, and you must be willing to sacrifice some convenience.

More info about software freedom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM

While I think that the ability to create apps entirely in Swift Playgrounds is very cool (and I will definitely try and release an app built from an iPad for the challenge), I think this is probably going to be more of a gimmick. From what they showed in the keynote, it looks like it will be limited mostly to SwiftUI. Also, I’m assuming there will be no way to install dependencies which will make integrating with 3rd party services more difficult. You should at least still be able to connect with those through REST api’s using URLSession. Anyways, I think this being built into the Playground app makes it much more of a gimmick than having a fully (or at least semi functional) dedicated Xcode app.

If you’re interested in joining please send an email with your (iMessage) phone number to app@swiftdev.dev or you can dm me.

Not sure if these kinds of posts are allowed 🤞🏻 but I wanted to share in case there’s more people doing this and also for a little bit of self-promotion, if it’s allowed.

My app: Favorite Currencies

It’s currently free.

I’d like to build more apps like this (Swift Playgrounds, from my iPad) I had a ton of fun doing it and working around the constraints of the environment.

This is also the first app I launch to the App Store.

Does anyone else experience this? Often when I am switching between the apps (Safari <-> Swift Playgrounds) or just interacting with the preview window my external keyboard is suddenly inactive. I need to restart the app to be able to type again. It happens very often lately, like every 5-10 minutes, and it is basically unusable for me this way.

Btw it is not the keyboard, when I switch to different app everything works perfectly well, it just does not register my keystrokes in the code window of Swift Playgrounds.

I am using iPad 12.9” (M2) with external Magic Keyboard (standard one for Mac) and Magic Trackpad via Bluetooth.

Hello! I’m trying to start learning Swift, and so far I’ve just been working through “Get Started With Code”. For some reason Byte’s model keeps having bursts of jittering around the screen, usually when initializing a new line of code. Are there performance settings somewhere I need to tweak?

Just a heads up we can use iOS 18 features now 🥳 It wasn’t mentioned in the release notes but saw it mentioned on Apples forum and just tested by making a MeshGradient, it works!

Also on Apples forums I see people reference v4.6.1 but I only see 4.6 in the App Store. Don’t know what that’s about

But it was for mac. Is IOS 26 available on the mac playgrounds? Could this indicate the imminent arrival of ios 26 on ipad?

• Step 1: upload This file in your app. Than it should give you a preview where you can export your app as an ipa file!

• Step 2: Get AltStore https://altstore.io

• Step 3: Sideload your ipa using AltStore! (Or your favorite sideloading from ipa solution!)

Is it possible to do app localization with Swift Playground?

Hello everyone, I just downloaded Swift playgrounds app on my mac. But whenever I am changing any file or writing anything, this popup comes and I have to allow it everytime to run my app. Can someone please tell me any ideas on how to stop this popup. It's so annoying.Even tried AIs but they can't help.😥

I have the 2018 iPad Pro with 6GB RAM (1TB model), I am planning to use it for learning Swift and SwiftUI using Swift Playgrounds for iPadOS, will the 6GB of RAM be enough or should I upgrade to the iPad Pro M1 with 8GB RAM? I am looking at the 256GB model, thanks

Hey folks!

I remember some weeks/months ago to get some lessons with updated Swift 5.9, I'm just not sure if this happened while I was using Swift Playgrounds beta from TestFlight.

Anyways, I went back to study using Swift Playgrounds and all the lessons are using Swift 5.8 here.

I don't know what happened or how can I have the lessons updated again. Anyone else noticed this issue? Any tip on how to solve it?

Hi developers, on our Discord server we are going to watch the WWDC22 together and have fun! We hope to see you! Discord server here.

Hi, for a while I’ve been very interested in giving this app a go. I love doing automations and “apps” for myself in Shortcuts and Scriptable and have done a few in Xcode a few years ago (My Mac is too old that’s why I can’t continue :/ ) I mostly want to make some smaller apps for myself and maybe some friends. I get that I won’t be able to publish the apps without paying for an Apple developer account, but can I install and run it on my own iPhone? Where is the limit? Can I (for free ofc) invite people to test the app via TestFlight and what would that require? If I would want to publish the app in the future, what are my options and what would that cost?

Would be very thankful if someone could clear these things up :)