Weekend good reads for Apple developers, issue #53

It is officially winter and here is new great pack of good articles for all Apple developers.

Have a great first winter weekend and see you soon!

Weekend good reads for Apple developers, issue #40

Some places will have longer weekend this time, so let's pack it with great reads!

That is all for this weekend! Enjoy the extra day, if applicable :)

Apple releases iOS 15.2, macOS 12.1, Xcode 13.2 and other platforms

Big day for Apple users – macOS 12.1 Monterey with SharePlay support is released. iOS/iPadOS 15.2 is also released together with watchOS 8.3 and tvOS 15.2.

Important new features in the updates:

  • SharePlay is available on macOS 12.1 Monterey;
  • iOS, iPadOS, watchOS provide App Privacy Report allowing users to inspect app network activity in a friendly form;
  • Communication safety features for children are added, will notify children of potentially unsafe content;
  • Digital Legacy is now added allowing users to designate people to take care of Apple ID when user passes away;
  • Updates add support for Apple Music Voice plan;
  • Xcode 13.2 brings support for upcoming Swift Playgrounds 4 project format;
  • Swift Concurrency back deployment is now enabled in Xcode 13.2.

Xcode download from App Store might be broken for now

According to Developer Forums thread there might be issues with Xcode 13.2 downloaded from App Store. This issues might also be already resolved. In case, you see similar behavior, please use Developer Downloads section to get Xcode 13.2.

Together with macOS Monterey, Apple also pushed security updates for macOS Big Sur and macOS Catalina.

Apple also updates Developer Agreement to reflect changes related to Swift Playgrounds 4 and Xcode Cloud.

HomePodOS gets 15.2 update which brings new Siri languages including Dutch and Russian, hinting new territories for HomePod sales. tvOS 15.2 also gets new languages supported for Siri.

Notably, Universal Control feature is postponed til Spring 2022.

Release notes:

Reference:

Several Siri intents are getting removed in iOS 15

Apple is removing some of intents used to add Siri support to the application in iOS 15. Apple states that these Intents had very low adoption.

When iOS 15 is released if user asks Siri to perform such action Siri will respond that this is not possible. Also, when building on iOS 15 SDK usage of these intents will trigger compilation warning.