SwiftData Two Years Later: What's Solid, What Still Bites, and the Migration Test You're Not Writing
Day 14 of the 30-day iOS series. SwiftData is about two years old now, and the honest verdict is mixed. I already wrote the long field report on where it broke in production — this post is the part that report didn't have room for: a VersionedSchema + SchemaMigrationPlan test that proves a schema change is safe BEFORE TestFlight finds out for you.
ObservableObject → @Observable: The Migration Guide That Skips the Marketing (and the Autoclosure Gotcha Apple Forgot to Mention)
Day 11 of the 30-day iOS series. Apple's migration guide makes ObservableObject → @Observable look like a find-and-replace. It mostly is — except for one quiet behavioral change: @StateObject only ran your initializer once, and @State runs it on every render. Here's the multiple-init bug that causes, why it's worst in exactly the init you were proud of, and how to fix it with a test that turns 'no side effects in init' into a hard, green invariant.
UIDesignRequiresCompatibility: When (and Why) Opting Out of Liquid Glass Is the Pro Move
Apple hands you one Info.plist key that freezes the old design for a full year. It's not a cop-out — for banking, enterprise, and apps caught mid-redesign, opting out of Liquid Glass is the responsible call. The exact flag, a real before/after from my own app, the deadline, and a decision matrix you can actually defend in a standup. Plus the per-screen rollout gate you should be testing instead.
Your App Just Got an Eviction Notice: Liquid Glass Is Mandatory in iOS 27
Apple confirmed Liquid Glass is non-negotiable in Xcode 27. Your custom tab bars, navigation views, and carefully crafted layouts are about to meet a wrecking ball called UIDropShadowView. Here's exactly what breaks, what the timeline looks like, and how to survive the migration before WWDC drops on June 8.
Migrating a Real App to Swift 6.2 Strict Concurrency: 86 Errors, One Afternoon, One Race Condition I Didn't Know I Had
I migrated Invoize from Swift 6.0 strict mode to Swift 6.2 approachable concurrency on a Sunday afternoon. Every warning, every fix, the one real race condition the compiler finally surfaced — and the TDD seams I leaned on so the migration wasn't just compiler-driven guessing.