What's new in SwiftUI for iOS 26
WebView, rich text editing for TextEditor, section index list titles, and more
Although the SwiftUI changes this year are a little smaller than we're used to, this year's SwiftUI update resolves a handful of common complaints folks hit when building – things that would pretty much always require us to drop down to UIKit can now be done natively, which is great.
This year the two biggest changes are:
- How to embed web content using
WebView - How to use rich-text editing with TextView and AttributedString
But in talking to developers, it's been interesting to see how smaller features are often more popular, usually because they finally resolve long-standing annoyances with SwiftUI:
- How to add list section index labels
- How to give label icons a fixed width
- How to automatically add appropriate padding for the current scene
- The
@Animatablemacro makes it easier to animate views, modifiers, and more - The
openURLaction has been extended to support an in-app browser
Once again we got a fantastic update from SF Symbols – the new draw on animations are thoroughly beautiul, particularly when used with things like checkboxes.
And there's also a bundle of updates specifically aimed at Apple's new liquid glass user interface, including:
- How to make a TabView minimize on scroll
- How to add a TabView accessory
- How to adjust the scroll edge effect for ScrollView and List
- We can now specify custom section spacing inside a list
- How to add space in a toolbar
- We can now set a navigation subtitle
The real work is down to developers who want to get a great liquid glass experience while also retaining compatibility with iOS 18 and earlier. My advice is not to rush: wait until at least beta 4 or perhaps even 5 before you start moving code across, so you have time to let the API settle a little and also to get used to how the effects look and feel.
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What's still missing?
Every year folks including me ask the same question: what is still missing from SwiftUI after this year's update? Every year the list gets shorter, but there are still a few outstanding problems:
- Importing images from the camera
- Scanning QR codes and bar codes
- Cache control for
AsyncImageView - Making
@AppStoragesync with iCloud - Detecting shake gestures
- Reading and writing data with the keychain
It's also frustrating to see Apple ship all-new API without SwiftUI wrappers, with PaperKit being this year's primary offender.
As for SwiftData… well, it's not great news, let's put it that way.
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