Personal Apps With Swift Playgrounds 4?

iOS
1

Now that Swift Playgrounds supports submitting apps to the App Store (which I don’t want to do) is it feasible to build “Personal Apps” with it?

By a Personal App I mean one that you build to run on your own iPad - and have no intention of publishing to the App Store.

I’m thinking a UI that is more customised than you can do with eg Scriptable would be a good example of why you might do this. (No disrespect to Scriptable of course.)

The answer has to be “yes” if you’re prepared to load and run inside Swift Playgrounds itself.

But, I would prefer standalone (probably not doable) or invoking in Swift Playgrounds by some external method (doubtful).

Should I be trying to build ultra-flexible UIs some other way?

My motivation is obvious: On any other platform I’d be building little tools for my own use somehow, and most of those platforms would allow me a lot of flexibility. More than we’ve had on iPad OS or iOS so far.

Thoughts?

2

Can whatever you build in Swift Playgrounds run on iOS too without signing/submitting to the App Store? Because if you can there goes my free time :flushed:

3

I was JUST looking for a good tutorial for a (any) super basic app just to see if I could get something on my Home Screen. I don’t have a real use case in mind. it just sounded fun.

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4

It sounded fun to me, too.

A couple of points that occurred to me…

  1. If we want people to learn Swift UI a “low stakes but usable in Production” approach would be good.
  2. Before I sent anything off to the App Store I’d want to test on an iOS device outside of Swift Playgrounds.

Both of these motivate my idea.

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5

But, I would prefer standalone (probably not doable) or invoking in Swift Playgrounds by some external method (doubtful).

Not used Swift playground but build apps using Flutter and you can use TestFlight to install the app on your phone/ipad and no paid developer account is needed. The only downside with is that it only last for a while before automatically uninstalling. I think its 2 weeks or something like that. So evey 2 week you would need to reinstall the app.

6

Never heard of Flutter but I’ll check it out.

I did several swift playground lessons over the weekend. If nothing else it scratched my itch for “I want to automate something but don’t have any real needs”

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7

It’s heresy in here since it is from google and for building cross-platform apps across the web, desktop, ios, and android :wink:

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