Swift Playgrounds 4
Apple today released Swift Playgrounds 4, an update to the Swift Playgrounds app that’s been in the works for some time. The newest version of the app allows iPhone and iPad apps to be created directly on an iPad without the need for a Mac.
Swift Playgrounds 4 includes App Store Connect integration for uploading a finished app to the App Store , plus there is an App Preview feature that shows live updates as you make changes.
While you can monetize your app as a paid-upfront app just fine, there’s no access to In-App Purchase, which feels like an unnecessary restriction on people learning to develop iOS apps through Playgrounds — paid-upfront is extremely hard to make work even for experienced devs
Tim Cook: We have 60 apps on the App Store. They go through the same rules that the 1.7 million do
also Tim Cook’s company app from the App Store:
Previously:
Update (2021-12-20): Damien Petrilli:
So you can’t even use Core Data in Swift Playgrounds 4? (+ no git)
“We can’t wait to see what you are going to ship with it”
Let’s be honest, Playgrounds is so limited that most Apps would be rejected during the App review for being too simple.
You can use Core Data, but you have to create the managed object model in code. I like to do that, anyway, but it’s not very friendly for beginners. Not having version control is an even more serious problem.
Here’s the full code to export .ipa’s from Swift Playgrounds 4.
Update (2022-01-07): Matt Waller:
In the end, this is exactly what it says it is: Swift Playgrounds. It’s a playground! It’s a place that is primarily great to figure things out. It’s certainly not Xcode on the iPad, nor is it a brand new App Composer app or anything like that. It will shine mostly as a great educational and prototyping tool.
And heck, it’s pretty great as a sideproject engine so far. I say that because there is a sweet spot where constraints enable creativity, like the limitations of a sonnet.
Via John Gruber:
Waller’s post is a great write-up delineating both the pros and cons of using Swift Playgrounds to develop (and publish) an entire app. He also kept a public development journal on Twitter, replete with animated screencasts of the app in-progress.
