Exploring SwiftUI with iOS26 · Currently coding

iOS 26 landed this fall with a slew of new SwiftUI capabilities, and I couldn’t resist diving in. My goal is to get a feel for the updated data flow APIs, the new animation system, and the richer widget kit support by building a small utility app from scratch. It’s partly an excuse to brush up on my Swift and partly a way to keep pace with Apple’s evolving UI framework.

I started by sketching a simple habit tracker that uses SwiftData for persistence and the new Observation macro to manage state. The declarative syntax in SwiftUI feels more mature now: complex layouts are easier to compose, and the new containerRelativeFrame modifier makes it trivial to build responsive UIs that adapt to different screen sizes. I also experimented with the phaseAnimator API to choreograph subtle transitions and interactive animations.

Widgets have gotten more powerful in iOS 26. I built a small widget that shows the day’s habits and lets me check them off without opening the app. The improved Intent API and the ability to update widgets on a schedule make them much more useful. I even toyed with the new SwiftUI Renderer that allows drawing custom charts directly in the view.

There are still rough edges—some of the new APIs lack examples, and tooling around previews occasionally glitches—but overall I’m impressed with how far SwiftUI has come. Next I plan to integrate CloudKit for syncing and explore how the new model container features simplify data migrations. For now, the app serves as a playground to test patterns and see what sticks.