How to read your app’s version from your Info.plist file

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

All iOS apps must store an app version number in their Info.plist file, but there’s no build-in way to get that as a string you can use in your code.

Fortunately, we can write a small extension to UIApplication that reads the Info.plist file and returns a version number automatically. This might not exist for some reason, so we’re going to make a static variable that returns an optional string in case there was a problem reading it.

Here’s the code:

extension UIApplication {
    static var appVersion: String? {
        return Bundle.main.object(forInfoDictionaryKey: "CFBundleShortVersionString") as? String
    }
}

Available from iOS 8.0