SwiftUI at WWDC 2025
Learn what’s new in SwiftUI to build great apps for any Apple platform. We’ll explore how to give your app a brand new look and feel with Liquid Glass. Discover how to boost performance with framework enhancements and new instruments, and integrate advanced capabilities like web content and rich text editing. We’ll also show you how SwiftUI is expanding to more places, including laying out views in three dimensions.
Is list/table performance actually fixed? The quoted 6x (loading) and 16x (updating) improvements sound good but don’t seem like enough to match NSTableView. The session cites improved scheduling and lazy loading rather than an architectural change. Maybe that’s not possible without changing the API.
Optimize SwiftUI performance with Instruments:
Discover the new SwiftUI instrument. We’ll cover how SwiftUI updates views, how changes in your app’s data affect those updates, and how the new instrument helps you visualize those causes and effects. To get the most out of this session, we recommend being familiar with writing apps in SwiftUI.
Explore concurrency in SwiftUI:
Discover how SwiftUI leverages Swift concurrency to build safe and responsive apps. Explore how SwiftUI uses the main actor by default and offloads work to other actors. Learn how to interpret concurrency annotations and manage async tasks with SwiftUI’s event loop for smooth animations and UI updates. You’ll leave knowing how to avoid data races and write code fearlessly.
Build a SwiftUI app with the new design:
Explore the ways Liquid Glass transforms the look and feel of your app. Discover how this stunning new material enhances toolbars, controls, and app structures across platforms, providing delightful interactions and seamlessly integrating your app with the system. Learn how to adopt new APIs that can help you make the most of Liquid Glass.
Discover how you can use WebKit to effortlessly integrate web content into your SwiftUI apps. Learn how to load and display web content, communicate with webpages, and more.
SwiftUI’s performance does seem to be pretty good on iOS 26, at least on the simulator. Seems that all of the table view issues I had with BurnoutBuddy are now gone!
So AppKit controls are now just wrappers on some custom/private SwiftUI views on macOS 26 Tahoe?
After the 6 years that has passed since SwiftUI was first announced, we finally get a native WebView, with some additional web-related tools.
So this is new in #SwiftUI! In AppKit, it was a paaaaaain to have your Settings window animate from tab to tab based on the view’s content. Some developers (even Apple) wouldn’t bother to do it in some apps.
SwiftUI has a modifier for resizing the window based on the content of the view for the selected tab!
WWDC25 seems like the least pushy re SwiftUI so far. It seems much more like ‘just another technology’ that you can use in your apps, as it should be, rather than the only way you should be making things.
All of the new UI across the platforms is built with and available to UIKit & AppKit (even if there may be sprinklings of SwiftUI under the hood), and a number of barriers that pushed you to SwiftUI before (like on visionOS) are now open to UIKit.
Seems much healthier!
I don’t know if this is just a temporary pause in messaging, or if the practical realities of SwiftUI have set in now that we’re six years in. It’s great for some things, but it’s not great for everything, and you will always be served well by having a bigger, better, more-powerful framework underneath — whatever that may be in the future
I always used to say SwiftUI unless your app needed long form text editing or a list/table with lots of data. With this year’s updates, I’m not sure about either of those limitations, so SwiftUI gets my vote.
Remember when SwiftUI launched and we all pretended it was production-ready, and it was. And now it’s been 26 years (but more like five) of SwiftUI and it’s better than ever.
While navigation stacks API didn’t change, the tab navigation provides us with a few new APIs allowing us to improve user experience respecting the new design language. If you still use old TabView APIs, it is a perfect time to refactor your tab navigation. While old APIs also get glassy transformations, the new ones allow us to craft them much better.
Now that you’ve seen everything from SwiftUI 26, what is still missing? What are the key pain points you hit?
Interaction of drag gestures and scroll view (that I need for scroll/long press and drag to scrub charts in @weathergraph - see below) is still bugridden and requires ugly hacks, some of them even OS version specific.
Previously:
- Showing Settings From macOS Menu Bar Items
- WWDC 2025 Links
- SwiftUI at WWDC24
- NSTableView With SwiftUI
- SwiftUI Performance Gotchas
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> Now that you’ve seen everything from SwiftUI 26, what is still missing? What are the key pain points you hit?
Taste? Usability? Good UI/UX guidelines used by the system vendor itself?
