What’s new in SwiftUI

SwiftUI has been evolving since the day it was announced in 2019. Every year, Apple adds new APIs and SwiftUI becomes more and more powerful. At the time of this writing, it is possible to create an iOS app exclusively using SwiftUI, without having to integrate UIKit. Since the previous edition of this book, Apple added new functionality to SwiftUI.

In WWDC 2022, Apple added new features to SwiftUI, improved some existing features, and even deprecated some of the APIs just introduced a few years ago. These are the most relevant features:

• Swift Charts, which allows you to create data visualizations across all Apple platforms
• New data-driven navigation with NavigationStack and NavigationSplitView
• Enhancements to Form, to support multi-platform apps with a single code base:
  • LabeledContent view to display pairs of data, like key-value pairs or title and description, inside forms
  • Deeper customization of multi-line TextField instances
  • New MultiDatePicker control to select more than one date
  • New mixed-state controls for Toggle and Picker views and a new format for Stepper views.
• Table, introduced in macOS 12, now available on iPadOS 16 and iOS 16, and new toolbar customization for iPadOS
• PhotosPicker view, a multi-platform and privacy-preserving API for picking photos and videos
• ShareLink view, which enables the presentation of the share sheet even in WatchOS
• Transferable protocol, to share data between apps
• ShapeStyle extensions like gradient and shadow, which can also be applied to SFSymbols
• Grid, to arrange content in a two-dimensional way
• Layout protocol to create full-custom layouts

In WWDC 2023, Apple added more functionality to SwiftUI. These are the most relevant features:

• Interactivity and animation added to widgets
• Improvement to Xcode previews with a new Preview(_:traits:body:) macro that supports UIKit and AppKit out of the box
• Native SwiftUI support for MapKit
• Interactivity and pie charts added to Swift Charts
• Navigation, date pickers, and toolbars available in WatchOS 10
• SwiftData, a successor of CoreData, used to persist data between app launches
• The Observable macro, and new @State, @Environment, and @Bindable property wrappers, offering a new way of sharing data throughout the app
• New powerful animations with the new spring animation, the PhaseAnimator struct, and the Keyframe Animator and CustomAnimation protocol
• Inspector, a new modal presentation with the inspector(isPresented:content:) view modifier
• Symbol Effects, animated symbols added to SF Symbols 5
• New powerful scrolling APIs: transition effects, scroll position, paged scrolling, and inset control
• Enhancements to list and tables: item selection, expanding sections programmatically, column visibility, column header visibility, hierarchical rows, and alternating row background
• New dialog customizations, new gestures, and new input events