At WWDC25 we launched a new type of Lab event for the developer community - Group Labs. A Group Lab is a panel Q&A designed for a large audience of developers. Group Labs are a unique opportunity for the community to submit questions directly to a panel of Apple engineers and designers. Here are the highlights from the WWDC25 Group Lab for UI Frameworks. How would you recommend developers start adopting the new design? Start by focusing on the foundational structural elements of your application, working from the "top down" or "bottom up" based on your application's hierarchy. These structural changes, like edge-to-edge content and updated navigation and controls, often require corresponding code modifications. As a first step, recompile your application with the new SDK to see what updates are automatically applied, especially if you've been using standard controls. Then, carefully analyze where the new design elements can be applied to your UI, paying particular attention to custom controls or UI that could benefit from a refresh. Address the large structural items first then focus on smaller details is recommended. Will we need to migrate our UI code to Swift and SwiftUI to adopt the new design? No, you will not need to migrate your UI code to Swift and SwiftUI to adopt the new design. The UI frameworks fully support the new design, allowing you to migrate your app with as little effort as possible, especially if you've been using standard controls. The goal is to make it easy to adopt the new design, regardless of your current UI framework, to achieve a cohesive look across the operating system. What was the reason for choosing Liquid Glass over frosted glass, as used in visionOS? The choice of Liquid Glass was driven by the desire to bring content to life. The see-through nature of Liquid Glass enhances this effect. The appearance of Liquid Glass adapts based on its size; larger glass elements look more frosted, which aligns with the design of visionOS, where everything feels larger and benefits from the frosted look. What are best practices for apps that use customized navigation bars? The new design emphasizes behavior and transitions as much as static appearance. Consider whether you truly need a custom navigation bar, or if the system-provided controls can meet your needs. Explore new APIs for subtitles and custom views in navigation bars, designed to support common use cases. If you still require a custom solution, ensure you're respecting safe areas using APIs like SwiftUI's safeAreaInset. When working with Liquid Glass, group related buttons in shared containers to maintain design consistency. Finally, mark glass containers as interactive. For branding, instead of coloring the navigation bar directly, consider incorporating branding colors into the content area behind the Liquid Glass controls. This creates a dynamic effect where the color is visible through the glass and moves with the content as the user scrolls. I want to know why new UI Framework APIs aren’t backward compatible, specifically in SwiftUI? It leads to code with lots of if-else statements. Existing APIs have been updated to work with the new design where possible, ensuring that apps using those APIs will adopt the new design and function on both older and newer operating systems. However, new APIs often depend on deep integration across the framework and graphics stack, making backward compatibility impractical. When using these new APIs, it's important to consider how they fit within the context of the latest OS. The use of if-else statements allows you to maintain compatibility with older systems while taking full advantage of the new APIs and design features on newer systems. If you are using new APIs, it likely means you are implementing something very specific to the new design language. Using conditional code allows you to intentionally create different code paths for the new design versus older operating systems. Prefer to use if #available where appropriate to intentionally adopt new design elements. Are there any Liquid Glass materials in iOS or macOS that are only available as part of dedicated components? Or are all those materials available through new UIKit and AppKit views? Yes, some variations of the Liquid Glass material are exclusively available through dedicated components like sliders, segmented controls, and tab bars. However, the "regular" and "clear" glass materials should satisfy most application requirements. If you encounter situations where these options are insufficient, please file feedback. If I were to create an app today, how should I design it to make it future proof using Liquid Glass? The best approach to future-proof your app is to utilize standard system controls and design your UI to align with the standard system look and feel. Using the framework-provided declarative API generally leads to easier adoption of future design changes, as you're expressing intent rather than specifying pixel-perfect visuals. Pay close attention to the design sessions offered this year, which cover the design motivation behind the Liquid Glass material and best practices for its use. Is it possible to implement your own sidebar on macOS without NSSplitViewController, but still provide the Liquid Glass appearance? While technically possible to create a custom sidebar that approximates the Liquid Glass appearance without using NSSplitViewController, it is not recommended. The system implementation of the sidebar involves significant unseen complexity, including interlayering with scroll edge effects and fullscreen behaviors. NSSplitViewController provides the necessary level of abstraction for the framework to handle these details correctly. Regarding the SceneDelagate and scene based life-cycle, I would like to confirm that AppDelegate is not going away. Also if the above is a correct understanding, is there any advice as to what should, and should not, be moved to the SceneDelegate? UIApplicationDelegate is not going away and still serves a purpose for application-level interactions with the system and managing scenes at a higher level. Move code related to your app's scene or UI into the UISceneDelegate. Remember that adopting scenes doesn't necessarily mean supporting multiple scenes; an app can be scene-based but still support only one scene. Refer to the tech note Migrating to the UIKit scene-based life cycle and the Make your UIKit app more flexible WWDC25 session for more information.

Here’s a recap of the Live Q&A for SwiftUI foundations: Build great apps with SwiftUI. If you participated and asked questions, thank you for coming and participating! If you weren’t able to join us live we hope this recap is useful Where can I watch the VOD? Is the sample code “Wishlist” that was shown available for download? You can view the replay of the entire event here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3vloOtZLkQ The sample code for the Wishlist app will be made available in the coming weeks on the Apple Developer website, we'll send an update via email when it is available. What are the best practices when it comes to building complex navigations in SwiftUI? The developer website has documentation on navigation style best practices. Explore navigation basics like NavigationStack and TabView to get a ground-up understanding. For documentation on navigation APIs see Navigation. How can I integrate UIKit with my SwiftUI app? What about adding SwiftUI into my UIKit app? See UIKit integration: Add UIKit views to your SwiftUI app, or use SwiftUI views in your UIKit app. Both UIKit and SwiftUI provide API to show a view hierarchy of the other. For UIKit to SwiftUI, you would use UIViewControllerRepresentable. For SwiftUI to UIKit, you would use UIHostingController. Landmarks: Interfacing with UIKit walks you through step by step how to implement UIKit in SwiftUI with UIViewControllerRepresentable, and this WWDC22 video demonstrates UIHostingController, for those that want to add SwiftUI to their UIKit. Does Wishlist feature a new iOS 26 font? How can I add custom fonts and text of my app? We’re glad to hear many of you liked wide text shown in Wishlist, however, It is the default system font with some light SwiftUI styling! Check it out for yourself in the sample code when made available, and you can learn more about customizing fonts and text by seeing Font and Applying custom fonts to text. Does Xcode have a dependency graph we can use to optimize our SwiftUI Views? Xcode comes with Instruments. Instruments is the best way to figure out what is causing excessive updates and other issues with performance. That link provides direct tutorials and resources for how to use and understand. Previews also have many useful tools for analyzing SwiftUI views, for more info see Previews in Xcode Check out this video from our latest WWDC Optimize SwiftUI performance with Instruments for information on how to use Instruments to profile and optimize your app with real-world applications If you still have questions, Check out the Instruments section of these forums and create a post so the community has the opportunity to help guide you. Are there UI debugging tools to help diagnose layout issues? Yes, Xcode also features a View Debugger located by selecting the View Debug Hierarchy, pictured below. Use the View Debugger to capture and inspect your view hierarchy, identifying which views affect window sizing. The SwiftUI Inspector also lets you examine view frames and layout behavior. See Diagnosing issues in the appearance of a running app to learn about debugging visual and layout issues. As an absolute beginner, what would be the first go-to step to go for training? Do I need prior knowledge of frameworks to get started with SwiftUI? A great place to learn how to develop for Apple platforms is with Pathways! Many developers start with Develop in Swift tutorials, which exposes you to several frameworks while teaching you the basics of SwiftUI. When you're ready to take your learning further, you can read the documentation for the specific frameworks that interest you at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/.

So I am looking to use a custom NSWindow application (so I can implement some enhanced resizing/dragging behavior which is only possible overriding NSWindow). The problem is my whole application is currently SwiftUI-based (see the project here: https://github.com/msdrigg/Roam/blob/50a2a641aa5f2fccb4382e14dbb410c1679d8b0c/Roam/RoamApp.swift). I know there is a way to make this work by dropping my @main SwiftUI app and replacing it with a SwiftUI root view hosted in a standard AppKit root app, but that feels like I'm going backwards. Is there another way to get access (and override) the root NSWindow for a SwiftUI app?

Hello, is there a way to implement Continuity Markup in our own apps? (This is what I'm talking about: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102269 , scroll down to "Use Continuity Markup"). Also, why does a QuickLook panel (QLPreviewPanel.shared()) not display the markup options when triggered from my app for png image files in my app's Group Container? Do I need to implement certain NSServicesMenuRequestor methods for that? Sadly, I could not find any docs on that. Thank you, – Matthias

I've been looking for a solution to configure the Apple TV remote(s) from the 5th generation and upwards. Some of the basic functionalities are disabling buttons on the physical remote control while maintaining proper functionality on remote controller apps on iOS devices. There seems to be a lack of relevant entitlements in that category, and without it I can't seem to figure out a way to make it work. Any ideas on the matter? Maybe a workaround that allows to configure the Apple TV to work with other remotes? Thank you in advance to anyone that put in thought to my query.

There has been a long lasting UIStackView bug dating back to 2016 that still exists in the latest Xcode 16.3 and SDKs, where calling setHidden:true multiple times (lets say twice) on a subview of that stack view requires calling setHidden:false twice before the subview shows up again. This was originally documented via Radar #25087688. Hopefully a Frameworks Engineer here on the forums can raise it to the attention of the appropriate engineers. It would be really nice if this eventually gets fixed, because it's one of those odd issues where you end up wasting a lot of time trying to debug because everything looks correct.

I released an app for iPhone (and it's could be downloaded for iPad also), and now I developered another app for iPad version with the same code and logic but I modified the layout to fit bigger screen and make better user experience and appearance. Howevert the app review rejected my release due to the duplicate content, how can I solve it?

When my CPMapButton is selected/focused, I would like to be able to provide a focusedImage to correctly show the button when the blue focus is shown. Currently I have: What do I need to do to create an image that works more like the panning interface buttons?

Hello, In a new app I am working on I noticed the FamilyActivityTitleView that displays "ApplicationToken" has wrong (black) color when phone is set to light mode but app is using dark mode via override. We display user's selected apps and the labels are rendered correctly at first, but then when user updates selection with FamilyActivityPicker, then those newly added apps are rendered with black titles. The problem goes away when I close the screen and open it again. It also doesn't happen when phone is set to dark theme. I am currently noticing the issue on iOS 18.4.1. I have tried various workarounds like forcing white text in the custom label style, forcing re-render with custom .id value but nothing helped. Is there any way how to fix this?

For now, my app name length is more than 20 characters, so the iPhone app name displays without a space, and uses the range operator to ensure showing the rest in the next line. Is it possible to show space and name with 2 lines?

We've seen a spike in crashes on iOS 18.4 across both iPhone & iPad. We can't reproduce it, but it looks like it happens when the app goes into the background. Crash Log

Anybody can help me with the problems of splashboard? My request is to create a launchScreen.storyboard that can follows system's theme. So in the storyboard i use the image set resource which is created in Assets.xcassets. But i encountered the following problems： when i use image set resource，the splashboard is black, seems like springboard fail to generate the ktx file. But when i move the same image file to the root of Resource directory, it works. Why???? Some image works when it is put in Image set, some file can't. But all file don't work when the image set contains both light image and dark image. Why??? Suddenly it works for when i change compression attribute to lossess，so i guess the problems hanppened when my image is compressed. And two days later, the splash board is dark again when i debug. So what is the cache strategy for the splash board and the image resource used. How can i clear the cache, delete the app is not enough? Should i restart my phone? That's all, anybody can help me?

Using the new floating tab bar with ios18 on ipad with an RTL language, when the tabbar is correctly flipped and the right buttons become left buttons, the buttons are pushed off the screen on initial load but do come back after some navigating / reloading, have recreated in a fresh project.

There appears to be a visual bug when using .searchable in a child view that’s pushed via NavigationLink inside a NavigationStack. Specifically, the search bar appears briefly in the wrong position (or animates in an unexpected way) during the transition to the child view. This issue does not occur when using NavigationView instead of NavigationStack. Steps to Reproduce: Create a TabView with a single tab containing a NavigationStack. Push from a ContentView to a DetailsView using NavigationLink. Add a .searchable modifier to both the ContentView and DetailsView. Run the app and tap a row to navigate to the details view. Expected Behavior The search bar in the DetailsView should appear smoothly and in the correct position as the view transitions in, just like it does under NavigationView. Actual Behavior When the DetailsView appears, the search bar briefly animates or appears in the wrong location before settling into place. This results in a jarring or buggy visual experience. Feedback: FB17031212 Here is a reddit thread discussing the issue as well https://www.reddit.com/r/SwiftUI/comments/137epji/navigation_stack_with_search_bar_has_a_bug_and_a/ I hope that an Apple engineer can get this fixed soon. It's frustrating to have new APIs come out with the old deprecated yet there are still obvious bugs two years later. import SwiftUI public enum Tab { case main } struct AppTabNavigation: View { @State private var tabSelection = Tab.main var body: some View { TabView(selection: $tabSelection) { NavigationStack { ContentView() } .tag(Tab.main) .tabItem { Label("Main", systemImage: "star") } } } } struct ContentView: View { @State private var searchText = "" var body: some View { List(0..<100) { i in NavigationLink("Select \(i)", value: i) } .navigationTitle("Main") .searchable(text: $searchText) .navigationDestination(for: Int.self) { i in DetailsView(i: i) } } } struct DetailsView: View { @State private var searchText = "" let i: Int // MARK: - Body var body: some View { List { ForEach(0..<10, id: \.self) { i in Text("Hello \(i)") } } .navigationTitle(i.formatted()) .searchable(text: $searchText) } }

I am a developer on an enterprise application. Our team just updated our pipeline to build our app on the iOS 18 SDK instead of the 17.4 SDK and this has caused a lot of our ui elements to change and several crashes within the app resulting in just the simple error message "Swift runtime failure: unhandled C++ / Objective-C exception". Why is just updating the SDK causing all these issues? Is there anyway to keep the previous version or will we have to go component by component to fix the constraints and crashes? These issues seem to be happening to our users on iOS 18 and beyond.

Hi, Is there any way of changing the contentInset (UIKit variant) of a List in SwiftUI? I do not see any APIs for doing so, the closest I gotten is to use safeAreaInset . While visually that works the UX is broken as you can no longer "scroll" from the gap made by the .safeAreaInset(edge:alignment:spacing:content:) I have subbmited a feedback suggestion: FB16866956

In keyboard shortcuts this buttons at the bottom are overlappin. Any one else?

Hello, I was wondering if someone could clear-up my thinking here. e.g. consider the code below... It has a rootView with a navlink to a childView which in turn has navlinks to GrandchildViews. The root view uses basic navLInks NavigationLink{View} label: {View} The child view uses type-based navLinks navigationLink(value:) {View} and .navigationDestination(for:) {View} I would expect the basic navlinks to work in the root view and the type-based ones to work in the child view. However it appears that both are active when one taps on a link in the child view. e.g. User actions: Start -> RootView is only view on the stack -> (tap on ‘Child View’) -> ChildView is top of the stack -> tap on ‘Alice’ -> a second ChildView is top of the stack with a GrandchildView underneath…. Why does this happen, why are the basic links also applied to the childView's links? Thanks. struct Thing: Identifiable, Hashable { let id = UUID() let name: String } struct RootView: View { var body: some View { NavigationStack { List { NavigationLink { ChildView() } label: { Label("Child View", systemImage: "figure.and.child.holdinghands") } NavigationLink { Text("Hello") } label: { Label("Another navLink item in the list", systemImage: "circle") } } .padding() } } } struct ChildView: View { private var things = [ Thing(name: "Alice"), Thing(name: "Bob"), Thing(name: "Charlie"), ] var body: some View { Text("This is the child view") List { ForEach(things) { thing in NavigationLink(value: thing) { Text(thing.name) } } } .navigationTitle("Child View") .navigationDestination(for: Thing.self) { thing in GrandchildView(thing: thing) } } } struct GrandchildView: View { let thing: Thing var body: some View { Text("This is the GrandchildView: \(thing.name)") } }

I've coded a small raytracer that renders a scene (based on Peter Shirley's tutorial, I just coded it in Swift). The raytracer itself works fine, outputs a PPM file which is correct. However, I was hoping to enclose this in a UI that will update the picture as each pixel value gets updated during the render. So to that end I made a MacOS app, with a basic model-view architecture. Here is my model: // // RGBViewModel.swift // rtweekend_gui // // import SwiftUI // RGB structure to hold color values struct RGB { var r: UInt8 var g: UInt8 var b: UInt8 } // ViewModel to handle the RGB array and updates class RGBViewModel: ObservableObject { // Define the dimensions of your 2D array let width = 1200 let height = 675 // Published property to trigger UI updates @Published var rgbArray: [[RGB]] init() { // Initialize with black pixels rgbArray = Array(repeating: Array(repeating: RGB(r: 0, g: 0, b: 0), count: width), count: height) } func render_scene() { for j in 0..&lt;height { for i in 0..&lt;width { // Generate a random color let r = UInt8.random(in: 0...255) let g = UInt8.random(in: 0...255) let b = UInt8.random(in: 0...255) // Update on the main thread since this affects the UI DispatchQueue.main.async { // Update the array self.rgbArray[j][i] = RGB(r: r, g: g, b: b) } } } } and here is my view: // // RGBArrayView.swift // rtweekend_gui // // import SwiftUI struct RGBArrayView: View { // The 2D array of RGB values @StateObject private var viewModel = RGBViewModel() // Control the size of each pixel private let pixelSize: CGFloat = 1 var body: some View { VStack { // Display the RGB array Canvas { context, size in for y in 0..&lt;viewModel.rgbArray.count { for x in 0..&lt;viewModel.rgbArray[y].count { let rgb = viewModel.rgbArray[y][x] let rect = CGRect( x: CGFloat(x) * pixelSize, y: CGFloat(y) * pixelSize, width: pixelSize, height: pixelSize ) context.fill( Path(rect), with: .color(Color( red: Double(rgb.r) / 255.0, green: Double(rgb.g) / 255.0, blue: Double(rgb.b) / 255.0 )) ) } } } .border(Color.gray) // Button to start filling the array Button("Render") { viewModel.render_scene() } .padding() } .padding() .frame(width: CGFloat(viewModel.width) * pixelSize + 40, height: CGFloat(viewModel.height) * pixelSize + 80) } } // Preview for SwiftUI struct RGBArrayView_Previews: PreviewProvider { static var previews: some View { RGBArrayView() } } The render does work and the image displays, however, I thought I set it up to show the image updating pixel by pixel and that doesn't happen, the image shows up all at once. What am I doing wrong?

I have a custom keypad to accept numeric input for iPads that I have been using for many years now. This is longstanding working code. With iOS 18 the touchUpInside (and other) events in the underlying Objective-C modules are not called in the file owner module when activated from the interface. The buttons seem to be properly activated based on the visual cues (they change colors when pressed). This is occurring in both simulators and on hardware. Setting the target OS version does not help. What could the cause and/or solution of this be?

I am facing an issue in my CarPlay app using CPTabBarTemplate. The app has two tabs, and on launch, the first tab is correctly selected. However, when I tap on the first tab again, instead of staying active, it becomes inactive. This behavior is unexpected, as re-selecting the active tab should typically maintain its selected state. Has anyone else encountered this issue or found a workaround to prevent the tab from becoming inactive?

I want to add the option to choose an alternative icon inside the app. Is there a way to load an icon asset from within the app? I downloaded Apple’s alternative icon sample, which is supposed to show a list of icons to choose from, but even in the sample, it did not work. So the current solution is to add every alternative icon along with another image asset of the same image to display to the user. This sounds like a waste of bytes. Thank you in advance for any help.