What’s new in SwiftUI for iOS 14

Text views, grids, color pickers, and more!

Paul Hudson April 13th 2022 @twostraws

SwiftUI was inevitably going to see big changes this year, and I’m really excited to experiment with them all – text views, color pickers, progress views, and even limited support for grids have all landed. Alongside massive improvements to Swift itself (see What's new in Swift 5.3 for more on that), this is a huge leap forward for SwiftUI – we can now make a much wider range of apps.

Please keep in mind that these changes are very new – I'm pushing it as hard as I can, experimenting, refining, sharing, and learning all at the same time. If you have any feedback, please tweet me @twostraws.

You can watch the video below, or scroll down for links to articles.

The big stuff

More welcome improvements

New property wrappers

What is the @AppStorage property wrapper? – read and write UserDefaults easily
What is the @ScaledMetric property wrapper? – scales values based on Dynamic Type settings
What is the @StateObject property wrapper? – safely creates reference types in views
What is the @UIApplicationDelegateAdaptor property wrapper?

And there's more

Some existing API has seen improvements too:

How to use Dynamic Type with a custom font – this is much easier now
How to create a date picker and read values from it – includes the new GraphicalDatePickerStyle.

Plus, improvements in Swift mean you can now use if let and switch statements inside function builders. In practice, this means you can unwrap and use optionals like this:

struct ContentView: View {
    @State var username: String?

    var body: some View {
        Group {
            if let username = username {
                Text("Welcome, \(username)")
            } else {
                Image(systemName: "questionmark.circle")
            }
        }
        .font(.largeTitle)
    }
}

More will come soon – watch this space!

Based on what I’ve seen, many features from wishlists are still missing, including:

No sign of compositional collection views – the new grids are more like flow layouts
No sign of a way to add a text field to an alert
No sign of visual effect views
No sign of WebKit integration
No sign of tertiary/quaternary colors from UIKit

…but that's okay! We can't get everything all at once, and there's always iOS 15 😅