Celebrating our amazing community
After almost 1000 nominations and 6000 votes, it's time to announce the winners of the 2020 Swift Community Awards, chosen by you! Each category has one winner and one or more highly commended entries.
BEST CONFERENCE
Apart from WWDC, which conference was most interesting, insightful, or beneficial for your career?
Shortlisted: dotSwift (France), FrenchKit (France), iOS Conf SG (Singapore), NSSpain (Spain), try! Swift World, UIKonf (Germany)
Highly commended: iOS Conf SG.
Winner: NSSpain. From its name you might think this is a local conference in Spanish, but nothing could be further from the truth – NSSpain is a huge, vibrant, and exciting event that manages to surpass itself every year.
BEST DESIGN TOOL
Getting your user interface right is never easy, but the right tools can make all the difference. Which design resource do you think deserves special praise?
Shortlisted: Adobe XD, Affinity Designer, DetailsPro, Drama, Figma, Sketch.
Highly commended: Sketch.
Winner: Figma. This award has been won by Sketch for the last three years, so it's amazing to see Figma unseat them at the top – clearly their deeply collaborative approach is having a big impact on folks!
BEST THIRD-PARTY SERVICE
Wrestling with iTunes Connect, handling continuous integration, getting user feedback, and more – these tools help developers do more with less.
Shortlisted: Bitrise, Firebase, Instabug, MacStadium, RevenueCat, Sentry.
Highly commended: Bitrise.
Winner: RevenueCat. If you have a simple in-app purchase for a small app you do it with StoreKit. If you have anything even fractionally bigger, you do it with RevenueCat – it's not even a discussion any more.
BEST DEVELOPER TOOL
Which one tool has done the most to make your app development life better?
Shortlisted: Charles Proxy, Dash, Fork, Nova, Reveal, RocketSim, Tower.
Highly commended: Tower.
Winner: Charles Proxy. As the de facto standard tool for debugging networking issues no matter how complex, Charles is a go to app on both macOS and iOS.
BEST OPEN-SOURCE PROJECT
There are lots of open-source Swift frameworks on GitHub, but which one stood out above the rest?
Shortlisted: AudioKit, Moya, NetNewsWire, Nimble, SnapKit, SwiftFormat, SwiftUIX, XcodeGen.
Highly commended: SwiftUIX.
Winner: SwiftFormat. Everyone wants nice, clean Swift code, and SwiftFormat helps you get there faster – and goes even further by removing redundant code, adopting common conventions, and more.
MOST INSPIRING INDIE APP
Which indie app do you think did the most to show off what native app development is capable of?
Shortlisted: Aviary, Orbit, Pastel, Pocket Rocket, Push Hero, Widgetsmith.
Highly commended: Pocket Rocket and Aviary.
Winner: Widgetsmith. In a hugely competitive year for indie apps, one truly took the world by storm. Just a month after release, Widgetsmith managed to join the hallowed halls of indie apps that truly entered the mainstream, defining a whole new category of apps for the future.
MOST INSPIRING PRESENTATION
Over the last year, which talk at a conference has done the most to inspire you in your work?
Shortlisted: Erica Sadun: Property Wrappers, Federico Zanetello: Swift Scripts: Zero to Hero, Ishmael Shabazz: Integrating SwiftUI & UIKit, Josh Holtz: Implementing fastlane from nothing to App Store, Kaya Thomas: Swift Techniques for Testing, Tamar Nachmany: Community Engineering, Tim Oliver: Integrating SwiftUI with UIKit and Back Again, Vincent Pradeilles: Property Wrappers or How Swift decided to become Java.
Highly commended: Tim Oliver: Integrating SwiftUI with UIKit and Back Again, and Erica Sadun: Property Wrappers.
Winner: Josh Holtz: Implementing Fastlane from Nothing to the App Store. As the lead maintainer on a project relied on by countless thousands of users, it was no surprise that Josh delivered a fantastic talk on the topic – this one ought to be the canonical reference for some time.
RISING STAR
Which new Swift resource (website, YouTube channel, podcast, etc) do you think has had the biggest impact on our community?
Shortlisted: Allen Whearry (iOS Dev Happy Hour), Charlie Chapman (Launched podcast), Federico Zanetello (Five Stars), Jonathan Rasmusson (The Swift Arcade), Natascha Fadeeva (tanaschita.com), Pavel Zak (SwiftUI Weekly Challenge).
Highly commended: Charlie Chapman and Natascha Fadeeva.
Winner: Allen Whearry. With hundreds of millions of people stuck at home thanks to COVID-19, Allen decided to think different and bring us all together in informal monthly meetups. It's gone from success to success since launch, and I have no doubt iOS Dev Happy Hour will be a big highlight for 2021 and beyond.
Previous winners
You can view results from previous years using the links below:
