Preparing and updating your apps for Apple OS 26
You wanna re you wanna yeah. Restart it, and I will still interject. Yeah.
Peter:What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the CompileSwift Podcast. This week, we are going to be talking about our experiences as developers upgrading our apps to iOS 26, macOS 26, 26, everything. But first of all, how are you doing, Geoff?
Geoff:Yeah. I'm doing just great. I have been spending a lot of time in the 26 OS trenches, and it's been it's been an experience. Let's say that.
Peter:Yeah. And I think, no spoilers here, folks, but we've had two two pretty different experiences. Right? However, you know, we're gonna go through these, and I think the best place to start is with your experiences. So let's dive in here.
Peter:We're gonna start with Geoff's apps and his experiences because I'm sure he has spent a lot more time with this than I have. So, Geoff, how's it been going for you, buddy?
Geoff:Yeah. So I have my big two apps are the ones that I'm focusing on for this iOS 26 update. And we're gonna say iOS 26 throughout the stream today. When I say iOS 26, I also mean every platform that my apps run on. So for Bark, it truly is iOS 26.
Geoff:For Black Highlighter, it is iOS, macOS and iPadOS 26, and the rest of the apps as you see fit. Thank you
Peter:for saying that though, because that that's been my problem as I've been talking to people. It's like, oh, do I they're all 26. Can I just say 26, but I still say iOS 26? Yeah. Apple OS 26.
Geoff:Yeah. Apple 20 Yeah.
Peter:There you go, S. Yeah.
Geoff:Let's start with Bark first because I think that the story is a little bit more straightforward there. Bark is gaining a lot from the fact that it is 100% SwiftUI. And so a lot of what I want is kind of just built in. Additionally, Bark was built in the last year. It was literally built last year.
Geoff:And so I think it kind of was up to date with Apple's, let's call it, information architecture
Peter:Okay.
Geoff:As it exists in this year. And so it's kind of adopting a lot of what Apple was already expecting an app to look and behave like. And so when I just flip over to Liquid Glass, then everything more or less looks fine. There were definitely some tweaks that I needed to do for especially, the main kind of library list screen because by default, they're like, oh, yeah. We're assuming that you didn't get scroll views.
Geoff:Right? And so we're just gonna kinda, like, blur stuff at the top and bottom. And that looked horrible. And so just got a couple of tweaks there and kinda just disabling the scroll edge effect really did a lot there. And then kinda just cleaning up the buttons and how the toolbar interacts really got me most of the way towards where I want to be with Bark.
Geoff:So, that was one that was kind of not a lot of pain to deal with.
Peter:So I got a question. For those who have not seen the Bark interface and shame on them, explain for those folks who may not know what you mean about the top and the bottom blur. Right?
Geoff:Yeah. So that is not something that is in iOS 18. This is something Apple added in iOS 26, which is that when you scroll above and beyond or sorry. When you scroll such that content goes off the top of the screen or off the bottom of the screen, it gets this scroll edge effect where it just kinda progressively blurs whatever was at the bottom or top of the screen. And with Bark, you have a kinda set, it's this like waterfall grid of barcodes.
Geoff:And what happens is that you get that barcode near the end, and it just smears the barcode. And it looks it looks like, basically, you had a barcode printed out on paper, and then you spilled water over it. And it does not look all that good.
Peter:So it looks authentic then. That's what you're saying. Right?
Geoff:It looks real great. And if you look at, say, the Photos app, Apple doesn't do that in the photos app because the content is expected to kind of behave, I guess, as as much as were. Beta users can debate whether or not that's actually true, but it is kind of what is expected to happen. And then, really, you've just got a toolbar floating over that, and it's more about making sure that the toolbar is doing the right thing so that you're not fighting with the content. The scroll edge effect is really kind of there to be like this default that exists to go, okay.
Geoff:We're not gonna fight with the content by just mangling the content, basically.
Peter:So oh yeah. Actually what about is it worth me asking about well, how has it affected the watch experience?
Geoff:I have not tested that, and I don't know why. That's a great thing that I should probably test.
Peter:Well, the the reason I say it is because when I think of Bach
Geoff:I think of here's the watch. Right? Which is which is great. Yeah. I mean, that that is the original version of it was built Yeah.
Geoff:Only for the watch. It was a stand alone watch app. I think the answer is I don't think I've actually installed the beta on watch on my watch Mhmm. Yet. Okay.
Geoff:So
Peter:Yeah. I did wanna have one of the
Geoff:So the answer is yeah. The answer is I have not tried it. I expect that it probably doesn't change too much because there's not really much interactivity with Bark on the watch. So
Peter:No. I mean, it's just sort of designed
Geoff:to Yeah.
Peter:Make the barcode as big as possible. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Geoff:I I think that what's gonna happen is that the list of barcodes, which is just text on, like, just a scrolling list, that's gonna get a new UI. But because I didn't change or tweak that UI at all, like, it's just gonna get the standard UI.
Peter:Yeah. So it actually probably is beneficial to you then. Right? Because they say I've not tried it myself. But they say everything is at least a little bit bigger when it comes to texts and lists and so on.
Peter:So that's gonna be nothing but good. Right? So given that the the beta versions this year have changed quite significantly between each one, and I don't mean like they do every year, but obviously we've got a new UI this year. Which which beta versions have you been testing it against? And I'm sure it's more than one.
Peter:And, you know, what have what's been your experiences there? Has it kind of been a redo and a redo and a redo?
Geoff:So I've been using the all of the betas from day one. I installed the developer betas on a test phone. I did follow our advice that I said at the beginning and do not install beta one on your actual phone. You will regret it. And so I had that on a test phone and kind of messed with my two big apps.
Geoff:And we'll get back to the other big one later. But yeah. And so have been running against that. I hadn't really dug into a significant amount of work on it until recently because, as you said, things have been kind of flipping back and forth. So doing a lot of, like, planning and trying to understand the new design paradigm and that kind of thing, but not really jumping into doing a whole lot of work until these most recent betas.
Geoff:Okay. And with these most recent betas, we did get the public beta. And so I have now installed the public beta on my actual phone and have been doing that. If we want a quick tangent into a different app of mine real quick, not one of the big apps, Debigulator will also be getting a iOS 26 redesign. And it's not getting any changes to the actual code of the app.
Geoff:It is simply getting a new icon, composer derived icon, because the default icon that Apple generates on iOS 26 is disgusting. And so I really just want to go in there, swap out the icon, and just be like, yep, here's my iOS 26 update. It just makes the icon not look like garbage.
Peter:Alright. And and to be clear for folks who may not know what we're talking about there, the iOS 26, OS 26, whatever, tries to, in air quotes, intelligently apply this modern look to your icon that you've already got in your application. Sometimes it's a bit of a winner. Sometimes it's not so great. Personally, think I probably will go back and use that tool that they're releasing this year to just redo all of mine, because I'm sure they're still better designers than I am.
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Geoff:So, yeah, since installing the public beta, I've gotten a little bit more understanding of Apple's apps and whatnot. And so that is really where I'm starting now to do the updates to my apps and really take those on.
Peter:So explain what you mean by that. Are you taking, you know, the Apple apps right now as they are in the state of '26, say beta four is this recording or the public beta, and using their design principles as a guideline to rework some of yours? And if so, you know, what do you what does that entail? What does that mean? You're, like, pulling back on some of that third party design and going back to, you know, stock as it were?
Geoff:Yeah. So, basically, what is happening here is that we have very limited amounts of information on what is expected out of Liquid Glass and iOS 26 style designs. And so we have Apple's WWDC videos, we have the human interface guidelines, and we have Apple's own apps in iOS 26. And so the Hig and the WWC videos, they're very high level. They're very, you know, here's the ideals of Liquid Glass, but they don't really get into the nitty gritty of, well, What kinds of things are you wanting to have happen?
Geoff:Yeah. And that is something that you do get by looking at, well, what did Apple actually do in this scenario? And so being able to use Apple's apps, the ones that they have in the betas, is a way to kind of get an idea for what should your app be doing, what should your app look like. And if we want to segue here over to my other app, that has had much more impact on Black Highlighter than it has on Bark because it became obvious that Black Highlighter's design sensibilities dated as they are kind of didn't really fit with how Apple is designing apps these days.
Peter:So, you know, you're saying about how Black Highlighter feels dated. So let's talk about that a little bit. You know, put some numbers to this. When would you say you know, the the black highlighter with the interface that it has now, you know, that's been around since since when?
Geoff:Yeah. So black highlighter is kinda constantly going through little tiny updates, but I think the real, like, design system as it were was kinda set down in June 2019. That's quite a long time ago in in tech terms. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Geoff:It's, this six years ago. Mhmm. And so there are a lot of things just in terms of how the app is laid out. Not really, you know, it it not in a lot of ways design, like, as graphical design, but in terms of just information architecture. Like, the very strongly, like, push and pop driven architecture and not really having a tab bar.
Geoff:And it's got a sidebar in there, but it's kinda haphazard, and it really only exists on iPad and kind of things just they're not arranged the way that apps are arranged in twenty twenty five. And so I think that liquid glass kind of assumes that apps are arranged that way and it's making Mhmm. When I apply the liquid glass styling to this kind of more dated information architecture, it's it's really throwing into the spotlight exactly how kind of dated feeling the design of black highlighter is.
Peter:Okay.
Geoff:And it's hard to give exact specifics. You know, I I did say the sidebar versus, you know, lacking a tab bar and and kind of stuff like that. But really, it is just the feel of the application feels out of place on iOS 26 in a way that it was starting to in iOS 18, but throwing the behaviors of Liquid Glass onto the design of I mean, twenty nineteen would have been what iOS 13?
Peter:Yeah.
Geoff:Definitely does not feel good.
Peter:I gotcha. Well, you know, and interestingly, because you've hit on two the two views that most noticeably changed in iOS 26, which is, the new tab bar and the new sidebar. And so Yeah. You know, like you say, if if it's if you're not up to date with those, I think those will stand out quite significantly. And interestingly, one of the apps that I use every day is the podcast app.
Peter:So I have the 26 Beta four on my iPad and I've found actually that I kind of really like, you know, the new interface in the podcast app, and it is a good example of dealing with some of those interesting scenarios, especially the tab bar. You know, are you gonna take advantage, do you think, of that the new functionality where you can have I I know it has a name, and I've forgotten it. There's, like, that mini tab bar, like a collapsible one. Right?
Geoff:Mhmm. Yeah. I I think we might see that on the black highlighter edit page where it's not so much the collapsible toolbar as a whole, but the fact that I do have a search function in the edit view, which it allows you to look up words in whatever it is that you're attempting to redact and go, okay. You know, I always wanna redact, you know, my name, blah blah blah. You type in my name and you hit enter and it just goes and gets rid of everything.
Geoff:Gotcha. So that's definitely a thing where it's like, oh, well, they have a new way of doing this search interface. I definitely wanna take advantage of that. And things like that is is kind of things that I can take advantage of now, but don't necessarily look right in the way that my app is currently designed. So I think a big one that's really kind of causing this is black highlighter.
Geoff:When it was designed, you had these solid top and bottom bars. You had the solid nav bar, you had the solid toolbar, and it was very clear, here's where the nav bar is, here's where the content is. And over time, and I think especially in like iOS 14 or so, iOS 15 maybe, Apple kind of went, well, let's kind of hide those bars and just the content kind of like goes beneath it and like maybe sometimes it shows. And, you know, when you scroll, like then you see the tab bar, but until then it's like content in the tab bar, there's no separation anymore. And I never took advantage of that in Black High I always just left the solid bars on either end.
Geoff:And now that we've got liquid glass and liquid glass is kind of floating above the content. Well, in my apps, it's now floating above just black boxes as
Peter:Oh, I gotcha.
Geoff:And Okay. That looks kinda gross in in iOS 26. And it's like, yeah, the the nav bar and toolbar, they were already kind of slightly dated looking, but it didn't really stand out the way that it does now with iOS 26 where it goes, oh, you clearly just have a ton of black space at the bottom of the view for no real reason. And Apple really wants that to be you take that entire area, you fill it with content, and then you just have the buttons hovering over the content rather than hovering or rather than being contained in their own separate space.
Peter:Yeah. I do have to say that, you know, it feels like Apple's been moving in this direction for a while now where, you know, this seamless integration of content and controls. And I think that this version is a natural progression, and I think it's gonna be interesting to see where it goes. But for me, I feel very comfortable with it.
Geoff:Yeah. No. Absolutely. I I it's definitely obviously been a direction that Apple's been moving in for a while, and liquid glass is kind of just the extreme version of that. And this is on me for having kinda not kept up for the last couple years, and now it goes, oh, well, we've got this big jump with Liquid Glass.
Geoff:Now I really have to make that big jump myself.
Peter:Well, you know, and interestingly, I think Apple making this big jump this year has been, in many ways, kind of freeing for us as developers and designers. Right? Because it gives us that excuse to say, oh, great. I should go back and do the thing that I know I should have done, but maybe I procrastinated on it a bit too much.
Geoff:Yeah. Absolutely.
Peter:Okay. So I know from seeing you work on these apps and seeing these apps in general that, you know, Black Highlighter in particular is, you know, there's noticeable differences in the current versions between the UIs, say, in particular, like the Mac and, say, the iPhone, things like that. But now that Apple has given us this unified, design approach on all the platforms, do you think that's gonna play into your new design and just go for kind of, okay, one look for everything? Or do you plan to sort of say, oh, well, I kinda like the way that there's a little differences between them?
Geoff:Yeah. No. Getting this more unified is definitely a major goal of my 26 updates. I've really kind of over time treated it almost like it's running on three separate platforms. You've got iOS, iPadOS, macOS.
Geoff:And those were kind of almost designed entirely separately, and I'm really wanting to bring that more together. You know, I talked about earlier how the main image picker screen on Black Highlighter has a sidebar, and it's a big deal on iPad, but it's kinda just buried in iOS, and it's it's not really usable in iOS.
Peter:Mhmm.
Geoff:And that is something that I'm gonna have to fix in '26 and just really make that more of a thing. Mac OS is still gonna be kind of different because of just the nature of on iOS, Black Highlighter is picking from your photo library, whereas on Mac OS, you're basically able to use any file from anywhere on the system. Mhmm. And I think that that's that's key to the differences between those platforms. So Black Highlighter's edit screen is fairly similar between the two, but its image picker screen basically doesn't exist on macOS.
Geoff:And so I'm kinda trying to find ways to bring parts of that back in, but also unify the edit interface a lot more than it currently is and really have more of a shared ecosystem across platforms rather than having the three very separate designs. Time for a break.
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Peter:I strongly recommend this to every Mac user.
Geoff:Break time over.
Peter:Yeah. Let's talk about that because, obviously, it is a big year for iPad. And, you know, there is no question this year, iPad and Mac move a lot closer together. Now I gotta think that that's gonna cause you to seriously rethink some of that interface. Right?
Peter:Especially because now there's a possibility that users could be using it full screen or in a window.
Geoff:Yeah. Exactly. You know, the Windows stuff is gonna make it so that, you know, the iPad it kinda drags both platforms closer to the iPad in that, you know, the window could be shrunk down, so and you're basically seeing the iPhone interface on the iPad or you've got it, you know, mostly full screen. But I think the bigger changes are to stuff like, oh, now we've got a constant menu bar pulled up. And that means that my iPad app has to kind of go closer to the Mac app in terms of having full menu bar support and having, you know, obvious things in there so that people can quickly access important features, stuff like that.
Geoff:Where before, it's like, okay, everything's in that hold down command view, and it's not really organized. And maybe that was what I could get away with for the last couple releases. But this means that we've got a far more significant expectations on iPadOS than we have in the last couple years.
Peter:Yeah. And also, I think there's gonna be a bit of a learning curve for some users. Right? Because Mhmm. They you know, if you have never used a Mac, and and I hear there are some people out there like that, they're gonna use iPad, and then suddenly, they're gonna have this menu appear and, like, what's this?
Peter:Right? So you've gotta also presumably make sure that anything you're going to do on the menu or anything you're going do in the interface in Jamboard, you've kind of got to reflect it in both directions. Right?
Geoff:Yeah, exactly. And of course, you've got a little bit of cross pollination as well. I mean, if you look at Tahoe, for example, you've got all kinds of icons now in the menus that you didn't have before. And so that's gonna be something that really I kinda need to overhaul my menu handling entirely. Like, right now in Black Highlighter, the menu bar stuff is kind of only compiled at all on the Mac version.
Geoff:And I'm gonna need to take that, put that into the iPad version, but then also kind of grab some of the iconography that I have from iPad buttons and such and move that into the menu as well. And so there's gonna be a lot of grabbing things from all over the place and kind of sharing them across platforms. And iPadOS is kind of gonna be the center of all of that.
Peter:Gotcha. And and, of course, that's gonna help you from a technical perspective too. Right? Because in theory, I'm guessing it's gonna make it a lot easier for you to make updates and changes as you go forward or maybe not.
Geoff:I I I think a lot of that is gonna have to wait until an eventual, which I I at this point has become inevitable, SwiftUI. I really kinda had this architecture of SwiftUI on the outside, wrapping some kind of UI kit core pieces. And I think that that's something that I would have to do eventually with Black High Highlighter, where I've got the UI kit interface elements that have spent a long time building and really don't wanna rebuild in SwiftUI. But I'm able to kind of move them around and use them as puzzle pieces inside of a SwiftUI, you know, scaffolding. Let me let me do that last line a little bit.
Geoff:Inside of a SwiftUI scaffold, as it were.
Peter:So I know some of your application, Black Highlighter, is not SwiftUI this point.
Geoff:The majority of it.
Peter:Ah, the majority of it. Even better. Well, maybe not even better. And that was gonna be my question was, do you think that that's gonna make it a lot harder for you? Are you because you're gonna have to convert these to SwiftUI, or are you gonna go with the fact that Apple says, hey.
Peter:This new design theory is backwards compatible. You should be good. I mean, I'm thinking in, like, the Mac here, you know, where you're and that kind of thing.
Geoff:Yeah. No. I am not doing a SwiftUI port at the same time. I am going to keep it significantly majority UI kit even through this update and know that I will eventually need to kinda do that SwiftUI reckoning as it were.
Peter:Okay.
Geoff:But Okay. Through this iOS 26 update, I am going to stick with it being majority UI kit. And because right now, to to I go back to what this majority UI kit is. All of the photo picker screen, all of the document scanner, all of the editing, all of that, the vast majority of the app is still 100% UI kit. The only part of Black Highlighter that is SwiftUI is like the settings page.
Geoff:And so if you go into settings and you've got links to, like, the privacy policy and all my other apps, and then Mhmm. You go in and you've got the list of words that get automatically automatically. You've got the list of words that get automatically redacted. That is all SwiftUI at this point, but everything else in the app, the main functionality of the app is still 100 UIKit.
Peter:Interesting. So it sounds like some of this is a case of, a maintenance release in the sense of you you know you've gotta do this, right, so that it's sits happy and nice when 26 arrives. And then later on, you'll you'll come along and do the cleanup. Right?
Geoff:Yeah. Yeah. No. Keeping it in UIKit now, I think, is gonna be the most important part and making sure that I am able to do the design updates that I need. Because in my experience so far, doing the design updates that I need in UIKit is totally fine.
Geoff:Like,
Peter:they're Interesting.
Geoff:They're not sitting here and prioritizing SwiftUI in any way and saying, you know, oh, if you want to do this, you have to do it in SwiftUI. So it's been a good experience so far with UIKit going, okay, yeah, no, I can do this in UIKit. I just especially wanting to unify the three platforms a little bit more is going to be easier in SwiftUI than in UIKit. And it's that that I need to do as a later maintenance release where to kind of unify the architecture a little bit more. That's gonna be the part that's easier in SwiftUI rather than, oh, I need to adopt Liquid Glass.
Geoff:That's been totally fine just doing it in UI kit.
Peter:Gotcha. Yeah. I think you know? And thank you, Apple, for doing that. I I would imagine during dub dub DC when they said, you know, oh, hey.
Peter:It doesn't have to be SwiftUI. Huge sense of relief to everybody. Right? I was like, oh, good. However And I I have next
Geoff:I'm happy to yeah. I I'm happy to report that that was not one of Apple's, you know, white lies. Yeah. That that it is in fact no. Actually, UIKit works just fine in And Liquid Glass and all the things.
Geoff:Yeah.
Peter:And and I'll talk about that a little bit when when I I talk about my apps because kind of a similar experience. So yeah. Cool. Alright.
Geoff:But yeah. No. I mean, that's that's a good enough segue as any. Why not start talking about your apps? Are Yeah.
Geoff:How are your apps doing, and what what's your experience been?
Peter:Okay. So, you know, first of all, I have one app that I was actually starting to build when WWDC started. So, you know, I kinda got lucky there. I was already doing it with SwiftUI, and it's like, oh, great. Well, I just won't do any customization whatsoever, and we'll see how it works.
Peter:And it works just fine. On my Job Finder tracker app, interestingly, so far my experience has been I don't technically have to do anything because of the way I built it. It's all built with SwiftUI, but I've got, you know, I colors on things and and everything else. You really don't get the glass effect, for the most part. In fact, I I don't recall seeing it anywhere in the app.
Peter:So I could just leave it like that and not worry about it, but I actually feel, like I mentioned earlier, this is an opportunity to go back and say, okay. You know what? I never was completely satisfied with what I wanted it to be and what it ended up as, so I may back out a lot of the modifications I've made and see how it looks with just the, you know, sort of the stock glass effect. So that's gonna be that one. I wanna tell you about DigitalOcean.
Peter:DigitalOcean is a hosting company that I use for a lot of my projects. And I'm gonna tell you rather than just the usual thing that you hear on AdWords, I'm gonna tell you exactly how I use it. It is so simple to set up. You just log in, and I can set up very quickly with a few clicks whatever kind of instance I need on a server with whatever OS or preinstalled apps. I'm gonna give you a perfect example here.
Peter:It is so easy to set up Swift on the server side Vapor, and I did that recently, and it it was painless. You know, I went in there and I set it up. And before you knew it, my Swift app, I was bouncing off the APIs that I had created on the server side and testing everything that I needed to be tested. But you don't have to use it for projects just like that. You can really use it to host anything you want for any length of time because you're really only paying for the resources as you use them.
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Peter:What's also interesting though is in my jobby job, we have one app which is it's a mixture of storyboards, code, and a very, very small amount of SwiftUI. And we have found that after we went through everything, again, because we had set, you know, things like colors and and things like that, most of the app was okay. The only areas that are gonna need some attention are things like, understandably, tab bars. Some buttons are a bit weird. Those kind of things.
Peter:You know, like, for example, a button where you may have set a custom font color, but you didn't set a background. Something like that. Right? And, also, we have a solid background on the navigation bar just like you described, so we've got to deal with that. But it's been very minor.
Peter:Now what we did do though is we also tested and brace yourself folks, I'm going say the word here we've got one that's React Native. And the React Native one is no different at all. It it I I don't know if there's something smart going on there in the background or what, or it's because we've sort of, you know, gone with our own designs. And that's what I suspect it is, is that our designs are overruling it, but you don't see glass anywhere and it works just fine. Now there's an interesting side effect there though, right?
Peter:That maybe in the future we can debate is that could hurt you and it could be beneficial. Right? Not on the first, you know, it makes it beneficial that your app stands out because it doesn't have the glass effect. Just like they said on some other podcasts, if people don't like glass, that's going to work in your favor. But if they do like glass and you don't have it, you're going to look dated, like you said.
Peter:So we'll see how that goes. But ultimately, what it tells us is we don't have to update that app right now, which maybe is the way to go because I'm wondering if we're going to have this well, 26 goes out to the public, get people's opinions, and then maybe they tweak it a bit in point 1.2, whatever, and then we address it. So that's been my experiences with it so far has is I don't know if I wanna say it got lucky, but things just work other than some minor tweaks is the good news. And, thankfully, everything under the hood stays the same, so so no problem there. All of our stuff at this point is swift anyway.
Peter:So there you go.
Geoff:Awesome. I mean, yeah, it sounds like you kind of run the gamut a little bit from fully native to fully not native and have experiences with all of them, but it definitely doesn't sound like you're running into any major issues with it.
Peter:Yeah. I was very concerned about it.
Geoff:It could have gone much, much worse. Yeah.
Peter:Yeah. No. I I really was expecting React Native to either come out like it did and, like, don't have to touch a thing or honestly to be a complete disaster. And I was I was prepared for either one. But I think, you know, unscientifically, that's gonna be my my tip there for folks.
Peter:If you've done some kind of customization, regardless of how you've done it, you know, Swift or React Native or whatever, I think Glass is just gonna not do anything and you'll be okay unless you end up with a mixture of both. And then it's just the design choice. All right, so I think we've covered it there. You know, it's still early. Right?
Peter:And this is the weird part this year is it could still change between now and and the fall when it ships. But I did want to ask you one more question because we can test and we can do all the work now and sit and wait on it, but are you gonna have it ready to ship, you know, when iOS 26 ships and you're like, okay, pushing the button? Or do you plan to sort of have it mostly ready and then just wait just a little bit and not hit that first .o release?
Geoff:So the answer I'm gonna give you the two answers. The answers of what I want to have happen and what I may have Correct. Okay. What I would like to have happen is that both of them are ready day in date with the OS releases.
Peter:Okay.
Geoff:That is almost certainly going to be true for Bark. I think that there's not really any major reason why Bark would not be just ready to go with iOS 26. Because, again, it's only iOS with Bark and and WatchOS, I guess. With Black Highlighter, I would really love for it to be day in date and then really kind of lean into promoting it based on the new OSs and say, hey, look. Here's a new version of Black Highlighter that loves iOS 26 and really kind of embraces the fact that the platforms themselves are becoming more unified by making Black Highlighter more unified.
Geoff:And really see if I can kinda push Apple to go like, hey, promote me. I love you.
Peter:I was just gonna
Geoff:say yeah. And just, you know, I did all this work for for you. I I mean, we saw how well that worked with VisionPro, but it it Yeah. We But, yeah, I mean, it is it is a reason for me to be posting myself on social media and sending my things to press and all of that kind of thing to say like, hey, my app is ready for all the OS 26. And so Black Pie Ladder is kind of also my priority right now to kinda say like, that is the app that I want to have ready for everything because I want to have it ready for everything.
Geoff:Gotcha. And that's the big deal. And so that's kind of why, yeah, it's the one that's the most work and I decided to use that as the one that's my big priority, and so that's why I'm all stressed out and ridiculous. But yeah, no. That is what I want to have happen.
Geoff:I don't know that I physically will be able to make it happen in the amount of time that I have left, so we shall see. But my plan is to have those two apps ready day and date. Whether the Debigulator icon is ready in time, I don't know. It's not that big of a priority. Whether or not Kineo is ready or do I have any other apps right now?
Geoff:I don't think I do. You can cut that bit out. Whether Kineo is ready or not, it probably will not be. I probably will not be touching that app until a little while later. And so that app is gonna have the iOS 18 design for a while still, and we shall see what happens with that down the line.
Peter:Alright. Because there is one, you know, like you say, the Debigulator icon and even just all of these app updates in general, the other complication here is how close does everybody wait until the, you know, 26 submissions can begin to the app store because you've also got to do the updated screenshots, right? And at the moment, it's hard to look at something and go, okay, Unlike other years, you know, this year is a case of, well, shoot. This glass look could still be changing right up to the wire. Right?
Peter:And so how long do you wait to do, like you say, the media kit, the screenshots, and everything else? Because, as you say
Geoff:Especially somebody especially somebody like me that does all my screenshots in Sketch, and they are not actual screenshots in any way, shape, or form.
Peter:Well, and that's the other interesting part. Right? Because those you know, the the the kit for Sketch is available from Apple right now, but that could still change too. Right? Yep.
Peter:Absolutely. And so you've got all of that and your videos and and everything else, you but at some point, you have to say, I gotta do this. And I if I wanna if I wanna be there for it on the submission. So it is an interesting year, and, you know, it is gonna be up to the wire, I think, for a lot of this stuff. But I agree with you.
Peter:Get as much done as you can now and hope that the changes are minor between now and, you know, the time that Apple ships so that we can ship. Right? Theoretically, we've got at least, what, couple of months based on previous One
Geoff:month. I think we're down to one month as of recording.
Peter:Yeah, we're on what? The first public beta. There's going to be at least what? Well there will be at least one more, right? Yeah.
Peter:You know, we'll see. All right. Well, I think we've covered it pretty good here, but is there anything else you want to bring up that we haven't covered?
Geoff:No, I think we've hit all of the possibilities, Sam.
Peter:Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, in that case, all at least
Geoff:I I think I've gotta get back to working on this. I don't have to record anymore of this podcast.
Peter:That's it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. No more podcasts ever.
Peter:Just kidding, folks. Yeah. Alright. Well, in that case, where can folks find you if you happen to be out there in the world on the socials and everything else and not working in the cave?
Geoff:You can find everything that I have at cocoatype.com.
Peter:Alright. And you can find me at peterwitham.com. And, of course, as you all know, this podcast is at compileswift.com. That's it, folks. If you have some interesting experiences with going through this process like we are, hey.
Peter:I'd love to hear them about them. We'd love to talk about them. You can reach out to us compileswift.com/contact and let us know. Otherwise, that's it folks. Speak to you in the next one.
Geoff:Goodbye.
