Swift Community Awards – Hacking with Swift

Celebrating our amazing community

After over 900 nominations and 5000 votes, it's time to announce the winners of the 2021 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: 360|iDev (United States), iOS Conf SG (Singapore), NSSpain (Spain), SwiftLeeds (United Kingdom), SwiftUI Jam, try! Swift World.

Highly commended: SwiftUI Jam.

Winner: iOS Conf SG. Welcoming guests from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, and far beyond, iOS Conf SG has run two amazing online conferences thanks to COVID-19, but has a proud history of bringing our community together for years beforehand.

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: Bakery, DetailsPro, Figma, PaintCode, RocketSim, Rotato, Sketch, Vectornator.

Highly commended: Bakery.

Winner: Figma. The rise to power continues for this extraordinary collaborative design tool, and it certainly helps that it has a generous free tier too.

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, Codemagic, Firebase, Instabug, MacStadium, RevenueCat, Sentry, TelemetryDeck.

Highly commended: Bitrise.

Winner: Instabug. Whether it's application performance monitoring, crash reporting, or bug reporting, Instabug's blend of features and ease has helped build them a loyal following that continues to expand.

BEST DEVELOPER TOOL

Which one tool has done the most to make your app development life better?

Shortlisted: Bakery, Dash, Fork, Kaleidoscope, Paw, Reveal, RocketSim, SimGenie, SwiftFormat, Tower.

Highly commended: Tower.

Winner: Bakery. If you need a quick app icon for testing or previewing, there is no faster and simpler way to make one than Bakery – all it takes is a few clicks and you're done!

BEST OPEN-SOURCE PROJECT

There are lots of open-source Swift frameworks on GitHub, but which one stood out above the rest?

Shortlisted: AudioKit, CasePaths, Introspect, Swift Package Index, SwiftLint, SwiftUIX, Tuist.

Highly commended: Swift Package Index.

Winner: SwiftLint. Keeping your code neatly styled is always best done outside of code review, which is why so many teams bake SwiftLint right into their project build phases – truly a landmark project in our community.

MOST INSPIRING INDIE APP

Which indie app do you think did the most to show off what native app development is capable of?

Shortlisted: Amplosion, An Otter RSS Reader, Bakery, iOS Dev Jobs, Navi, Noir.

Highly commended: Navi.

Winner: iOS Dev Jobs. Opportunities for developers in our community continue to go from strength to strength, and iOS Dev Jobs leads the way in connecting companies to candidates.

MOST INSPIRING PRESENTATION

Over the last year, which talk at a conference has done the most to inspire you in your work?

Shortlisted: Alexander Repty: Reverse-Engineering Driven Development, Anna Zharkova: Combining SwiftUI and UIKit, AppClips and Widgets, Ben Scheirman: Advanced Codable, Kilo Loco: Becoming An iOS Development Expert, Leah Vogel: The Story of an App and a Hidden Gem of iOS, Malin Sundberg: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to SwiftUI, Moritz Philip Recke: How to create a media streaming app with SwiftUI and AWS.

Highly commended: Kilo Loco: Becoming An iOS Development Expert.

Winner: Malin Sundberg: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to SwiftUI. Malin is a thoughtful and entertaining speaker, and this particular talk of hers manages to cover vast swathes of SwiftUI in just 33 minutes.

RISING STAR

Which new Swift resource (website, YouTube channel, podcast, etc) do you think has had the biggest impact on our community?

Shortlisted: Create with Swift, Florian Schweizer, Jordi Bruin, Rudrank Riyam, Swift Anytime, Tunde Adegoroye.

Highly commended: Rudrank Riyam.

Winner: Tunde Adegoroye. Known to many as just "Tunds", Tunde's YouTube channel is a project that just exudes passion, and more recently he has exploded onto the conference scene too – definitely one to watch closely!