Swift teams announces X509 certificate and ASN.1 libraries

Swift team announced availability of swift-certificates and swift-asn1 projects. These projects target operations with X509 certificates (which are commonly used in TSL connections) and ASN.1 data type definition language.

Swift ASN.1 provides routines for DER serialization and deserialization.

Swift Certificates provides routines for X509 parsing, chain building, validation and OCSP resolution.

GitHub:

Swift team: Introducing Swift Certificates and Swift ASN.1

Point-Free Pointers announcing preview for Composable Architecture 1.0

Point-Free Pointers started working Composable Architecture (opinionated approach on SwiftUI application development) quite a long time ago. And now they're preparing the first release of the architecture.

Library is free to use and distributed under MIT license.

GitHub: swift-composable-architecture (discussion)

Reference: Composable Architecture 1.0 Preview

RevenueCat provides framework for in-app purchase receipt validation

While RevenueCat provides SDK for using its service, some of its components could be used by apps which do not use the service.

Receipt validation API will allow to parse receipt file and gather all necessary information to get list of approved purchases and also verify overall validity of the receipt.

GitHub: purchases-ios

Reference: Introducing ReceiptParser for Apple Platforms

Google plans to boost Fuchsia OS development in 2023

Google is ramping up the development of the Fuchsia OS. While it remains the primary author of Fuchsia, it is now opening up more parts of the OS's development to the public. Interested developers can take a peek at the open source project's bug tracker, for example, and can even submit patches.

Google also made public the project's roadmap to prove that it isn't simply a skunkworks endeavor. Interestingly, a lot of it involves a "version 2" of the operating system's major components, indicating that the current state of the project is far from the form that Google has envisioned for it.

We can also expect Fuchsia on Nest speakers to Fuchsia, with new models hinted for 2023. Everything shows that Fuchsia can start its popularity soon.

Spotify to use health data to improve playlists

Spotify is now working on Apple Health integration in their app to improve playlist quality. Spotify's approach is find songs that motivate users and improve their fitness results.

Using workout and health data might help improving communication with users and adjust features if app could affect user's workout performance or health in general (like, sleep, heart rate and so on).

Reference: Spotify working on HealthKit integration to provide workout playlists based on user health data

Swift team to make Foundation framework more open

Swift team announces future plans on Foundation framework.

Goal of the team now is use Swift across the framework, split it into simple separate packages and unify implementations to avoid and cross-platform issues.

This would result in more predictable app behavior, more cross-platform libraries and easier support of those.

Swift Blog: The Future of Foundation

SwiftUI backports aimed to simplify migration to new APIs

One of the problems with SwiftUI is that new APIs are bound to specific OS release and you can't use those on previous releases. And while we all want users to be on latest OS release, usually that is not the case.

Here backport libraries come into play.

Two libraries to improve SwiftUI new features adoption:

Having these libraries might help migrating app to newer SwiftUI APIs while maintaining support for previous OS releases.

Extensive regression testing is required!

While these libraries claim to provide support for the components, there might be still cases when components behave differently, or failing in some configurations.
Extensive testing will be required on all platforms including current and all previous versions. Testing should be performed on devices running corresponding OS releases.