Swift Newsletter: 11/11/2025

🚀 Welcome to Be Native's first newsletter!

First edition of our weekly newsletter, a space where every week we will bring you the highlights of the Apple and Swift ecosystem directly to your app. Our goal is simple: to keep you up to date without you having to navigate through a thousand different sites. Here you'll find what's important, explained in a clear and straightforward way.

And to start off on the right foot, here are the most interesting new features of October in the Swift world.

🎤 Server Side Swift Conference: Swift off your iPhone

At the beginning of October the Server Side Swift Conference was held in London, and it was a blast. The interesting thing about this event is that it focuses on using Swift beyond iOS apps. Yes, that Swift you know and love is also conquering servers and backend systems.

Performance without sacrificing security

Ben Cohen (one of the language greats) gave a keynote talking about the balance between ease of development and extreme performance. Think of it this way: it's like having a sports car that's also super safe and easy to drive. Swift gives you guarantees of memory safety, clean and expressive code, but when you need it to "go brrrr" (or as they say in English, it "goes brrr "), it can give you that too.

Observability: keeping an eye on your app in production

One of the key topics was observability in server-side applications. What does this mean? Imagine you have an app deployed in production serving thousands of requests. How do you know if it's running well? Where are the bottlenecks?

This is where swift-otel comes in, which has just reached version 1.0. This library implements the OpenTelemetry standard, which is like the nervous system of your application: it allows you to collect logs, metrics and traces of what is going on. It's like having a control panel where you see in real time what your code is doing.

The best thing is that async-http-client in version 1.29.0 already makes it easier to integrate, and even the new Valkey client for Swift (Valkey is a fork of Redis) comes with full distributed tracing support.

📱 Swift conquers Android

Yes, you read that right. The Android workgroup announced a preview SDK for developing Android apps with Swift. This is huge because it means you can use the same language you know to create apps on both platforms.

Think of it like being bilingual: instead of learning a whole new language (Kotlin/Java) to talk to Android, you can use your native Swift. Also, they already have a dedicated category in the forums where the community is sharing experiences and solving doubts.

💻 VS Code gets its act together with Swift

For those of you who develop server apps or just don't want to rely on Xcode, the Swift extension for VS Code is evolving rapidly. Version 2.12.0 brings swiftly integration (more on that later) and a walkthrough for new users.

It's as if VS Code is finally learning to speak Swift fluently instead of with a foreign accent.

🛠️ New workgroup: Build and Packaging

A new Swift code workgroup focused on build and packaging has been created under the ecosystem steering group. Its mission is to improve the tools we use to build and package our code.

Why does it matter? Because it's like having a team dedicated to improving your toolbox. While you develop, they make sure the hammer glues better, the saw cuts finer, and the tools work together without friction.

In addition, the Swift Package Manager documentation has been completely revamped and is now posted on docs.swift.org with API references included.

📦 Featured packages in the ecosystem.

Swift Configuration 0.2.0

This new package follows the same pattern as swift-log and swift-metrics. It aims to manage your app configuration in a standardized way, supporting JSON, YAML and environment variables.

Imagine your app needs different configurations for development, staging and production. Instead of having spaghetti code with ifs all over the place, you have a clean and predictable system for loading the appropriate configuration.

Swift Profile Recorder 0.3.8

This tool is an in-process profiler that helps you capture what your code is spending time on. It's like having a super accurate timer that tells you: "This function took 2ms, but this one ate 500ms".

With that information, you know exactly where to optimize without guessing.

Swift Collections 1.3

Swift Collections has added UniqueArray, a high-performance collection that takes advantage of Swift's new features: Span, InlineArray and non-copyable types.

UniqueArray is just like a normal array, but it ensures that there are no duplicate elements. And it does it super-efficiently thanks to the language's latest improvements in memory management.

swiftly 1.1.0

swiftly is a Swift version manager (think of it as nvm for Node or rbenv for Ruby). Version 1.1.0 improves integration with VS Code, making it easier to work with different versions of the compiler.

🎯 Conference highlights

If you're interested in the server-side of Swift, there are two talks you can't miss from the Server-Side Swift playlist:

• Unlock Generative AI for Swift Server-Side Development: Mona explains how to integrate large language models (LLMs) into your server-side code. Generative artificial intelligence, from Swift.
• Building Networking Libraries with Span and Concurrency](https://youtu.be/bVCY2m8ytXM)**: Joannis delves into how Swift's concurrency and the new Span feature in Swift 6.2 can create super-efficient networking libraries. Span allows you to access network buffers without copying data unnecessarily, such as working with references instead of duplicating files.

📋 Swift Evolution: the future of the language

Under active review

SE-0497: Controlling function definition visibility

Remember the @inlinable attribute? It allows the compiler to see the code of a function and can optimize it at the point of call (by inlining or specialization). This proposal goes one step further: it gives you explicit control over whether a function generates a callable symbol and whether its definition is available for optimization.

It's like having a three-position switch instead of just on/off: you can decide exactly what level of visibility and optimization you want for each function.

Recently accepted

SE-0495: C compatible functions and enums (✅ Accepted)

This proposal introduces the @c attribute to mark Swift functions and enums as C compatible. It basically formalizes and expands what was previously the experimental @_cdecl attribute.

Why does it matter? Because when you need to interoperate with C code (system libraries, legacy APIs, etc.), you now have an official and well-supported way to do it.

SE-0496: @inline(always) attribute (✅ Accepted)

The Swift compiler uses inlining to optimize code (expand the body of a function directly where it is called), but sometimes it decides not to do so because of size issues. With @inline(always) you can force that inlining when you know it's the right thing to do.

Imagine a super small function that is called millions of times. The call overhead can be significant. With this attribute you tell the compiler, "Trust me, this function should always expand."

🎁 Share your projects

Are you building something interesting with Swift? The Community Showcase on the forums is the perfect place to share it. You can also nominate interesting packages to be featured in the Official Package Showcase.

📚 To keep learning.

Remember that in Be Native we will continue to bring you every week the most important news of the ecosystem, explained in a clear and practical way. Our goal is to keep you up to date without having to do the research work.

See you in the next edition!

This article is based on the original post: What's new in Swift: October 2025 Edition.