Key features

Document launch experience

• The launch experience for document-based apps has been redesigned

• Get full control over the launch view’s design

• To learn more, watch Evolve your document launch experience

Tabs and sidebars

• on iPadOS, tab bars have visual updates and have more customization features

• The new compact look reduces empty space

• Combined tab bar and sidebar experience

  • See new UITabBarController APIs

• The sidebar and tab bar can be personalized by the user using drag and drop

  • See new UITab and UITabGroup APIs

• Native experience on both Mac Catalyst and visionOS

• Watch Elevate your tab and sidebar experience in iPadOS

Fluid transitions

• On iOS 18, there is a new zoom transition

• It works with navigation and presentations

• The transition is fully reversible and interruptible

SwiftUI interoperability

Animations

• You can now use SwiftUI animations to animate UIKit views

UIView.animate(.spring(duration: 0.5)) { ... }

• Includes SwiftUI custom animations

• Can be used to animate views with gestures

  • To do this, animate both when the gesture changes and when it ends

switch gesture.state {
case .changed:
    UIView.animate(.interactiveSpring) { ... }
case .ended:
    UIView.animate(.spring) { ... }
}

Gesture recognizers

• The gesture systems have been unified across SwiftUI and UIKit

• Support for coordination between gestures across both frameworks

Refer to SwiftUI gestures in UIKit

• Specify a name when setting up your SwiftUI gesture

SomeView()
    .gesture(doubleTap, name: "SwiftUIDoubleTap")

• In UIKit, check the name associated with a UIGestureRecognizer

• This can, for example, be used to set up failure cases for SwiftUI animations in UIKit

Add UIKit gesture recognizers to SwiftUI

• Adopt new protocol: UIGestureRecognizerRepresentable

• See What’s new in SwiftUI for adoption advice

Enhancements

Automatic trait tracking

• It’s now easier to use traits and handle changes

• View and view controller update methods now track which traits are used

• When any of the used traits change value, UIKit automatically performs an associated invalidation

• For example, if layoutSubviews() implementation accesses horizontalSizeClass trait, there is no need to call setNeedsLayout manually – it will be called by the automatic trait tracking system for you

List improvements

• Updating cells is now easier

• All views in UICollectionViews and UITableViews now have the UITraitCollection.listEnvironment trait set.

• Use the trait to style your cells

• With this, you don’t need to know the style of the list at the time of configuration of a cell

Update link

• Similar to CADisplayLink, but has more features, like view tracking, as well as the ability to use low latency mode and better performance

let updateLink = UIUpdateLink(
    view: view,
    actionTarget: self,
    selector: #selector(update)
)

• Activates automatically when the associated view is added to a visible window, and invalidates when removed

Symbol animations

• SF Symbols and UIKit have 3 new animation presets: .wiggle, .breathe, .rotate

• New periodic behavior allows to repeat animations a set number of times, or continuously

• .replace now seamlessly animates badges and slashes using Magic replace, and automatically falls back to existing behavior if needed

• Watch What’s new in SF Symbols 6 and Animate symbols in your app

Sensory feedback

• Sensory feedback is supported on iPad with Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard

  • UIFeedbackGenerator supports these interactions

  • New: UICanvasFeedbackGenerator, which is perfect for drawing and canvases

• You should now pass the location within the view where the feedback has occurred

  • Provide the context to UICanvasFeedbackGenerator using the alignmentOccurred(at:) method

Text improvements

• New formatting panel

• UITextViews that support rich text automatically support the new panel via a new Edit menu action

  • Set allowsEditingTextAttributes to true

• Developers can customize the formatting panel and disable features

• Text highlighting is supported by default by UITextView subclasses that support rich text

  • Controlled by attributed string attributes (.textHighlight and .textHighlightColorScheme)

Writing Tools

• Text views get the new Writing Tools UI by default

• There are new APIs to customize the behavior

Menu actions

• With iOS 18, menu actions are more useful for iPhone only apps

• UICommand, UIKeyCommand, and UIAction can be invoked by the system for automation

Apple Pencil

• PKToolPicker now lets you define the available tools

• New APIs for building custom tools into the tool picker