Swift to Add Support for Ownership, Macros, and C++ Interop

The Swift language workgroup has detailed the main focus areas for the development of Swift in 2023 and further on, which include defining an ownership model for memory management, non-copyable types, a macro system, and C++ interoperability.

Apple Announces Full Swift Rewrite of the Foundation Framework

The Swift team has started to work on a new open-source implementation of the Foundation framework. To be written entirely in Swift, the new Foundation aims to improve performance by getting rid of conversion costs between Objective-C and Swift as well as to provide the opportunity for modularizing and clean it up.

AirBnb Animation Engine Lottie Improves Performance by Adopting Core Animation

AirBnb has announced the fourth major iteration of its open-source vector-based animation engine Lottie. Thanks to the adoption of Core Animation, Lottie 4.0 provides significant performance improvements and reduces CPU load, says AirBnb iOS engineer Cal Stephens.

Generating Text Inputs for Mobile App Testing Using GPT-3

A group of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Monash University have presented a new approach to text input generation for mobile app testing based on a pre-trained large language model (LLM). Dubbed QTypist, the approach was evaluated on 106 Android apps and automated test tools, showing a significant improvement of testing performance.

Android Extension SDK Aims to Simplify the Use of Modular System Components

Introduced with Android 10, Modular System Components enable updating end-user devices outside of the normal Android release cycles. The new Extension SDK framework, now public, aims to make their integration simpler for developers.