iOS Digest 5 (April 27 - May 16)

^{Image source: The Verge}

While we, dear readers, were on vacation, interesting events took place in the world of Apple and iOS development. Details under the cut.

Industry news

• Update 12.3 for iOS and new versions of macOS, tvOS and watchOS have been released. Most of the changes affected the improvement of the UX application for Apple TV, although not everyone is happy with the result.
• As it turned out , the iPhone SE will not receive an update until the next iOS 13. Until the end is clear, stopping their support - they are selling well, the cost price is not high compared to the fake smartphones. Fans can only wait for the release of the iPhone Xe in September with a comparable screen size. A list of possible improvements in Apple's new OS ecosystem can be found in an article on bloomberg.com . Apple plans a major update of its applications, apparently for good reason last year for the first time in history they hired more programmers than developers of hardware.
• Apple Pay is now available as a payment method for purchases in iTunes, the Apple Store, Apple Music, iCloud storage. In addition, users can receive cashback when using.
• App stores are forecasting a speedy end at the hands of Progressive Web Apps. The article on Medium describes the current state of PWA, and that they improve the way applications are installed on smartphones. The author of the article is indignant - from Apple's lack of progress towards support on iOS and Safari, unlike, for example, Windows Store - there PWA-based applications can be easily uploaded to the store. As noted in the comments, articles and statements of this kind appear already approximately as much as mobile development exists, but so far the applications are very much alive. Also, there are questions to the security of using PWA - a more centralized ability to manage installed content helps to protect users from possible vulnerabilities, no one has heard about antiviruses on smartphones for a long time.
  
  It is clear that the current state of the AppStore is not ideal - for example, downloading some applications via WiFi only, the lack of good content structure. But it seems that if you make more than just an application dump from the store (noticeable changes are already visible, starting with iOS 12), it will become much more convenient to use it.

IOS development news

• It is recommended to read the article for those who in the application need to organize a synchronous managed data loading queue using OperationQueue. For an example, file loading using URLSession is considered, but the principle of operation can be used for any set of actions in an application.
• A small article for beginners from the fluffy.es resource on how to manage the background color of UIStackView.
• You cannot get away from functional programming in 2019 - we understand how to use pure functions in Swift .
• After you have dealt with the pure functions, it's time to ponder with the protocols and enumerations - when you can use one approach or another after reading the article Swift Tip: Enums vs. Protocols .
• Article Declarative Views with reflections on the declarative UI on iOS - why there is still no such powerful and convenient tool as DOM on the web or XAML from Microsoft.
• We understand how to use xconfig files to configure a project configuration without having to use Xcode, which will help avoid possible conflicts in version control systems when working in a team.
• For a change, some audio and video content - the Artificial Intelligence Podcast was released with the creator of the Swift language, Chris Lattner.
• Well, the funny thing: in Open Source came a clone of the game Wolfenstein 3D , written in Swift. You can play with the result or practice the code review.

And finally: next week we will hold a Mobius conference in St. Petersburg, there will also be a lot of interesting things about iOS development.