Introduction

Hinomori, Kinoshita, and Nakaguchi from the Mobile Development Group all attended the iOSDC Japan 2022. It was held as an in-person event for the first time in two years, but also streamed online, giving it a hybrid format. This allowed us to participate in both forms, according to our circumstances.
In this article, we'll share our thoughts on the event, and talk about some of the talks that made a particular impression on us.

Thoughts

Hinomori

Let me start by saying that this is the fifth year I've attended, and the novelty items are always amazing! The pamphlet is also getting thicker every year, and I'd like to go through it slowly when I have time. The T-shirt has a very chic design again this year, and has quickly become a favorite to wear at home.

Novelty items	Pamphlet

The event was held this year online and also in person for the first time in three years, but still being a parent of a young child myself, it's tricky to spend the whole day away. So, I grudgingly made do with joining in online.
(The Niconico live broadcast will apparently be running until 23:59 on October 12, 2022, so don't forget to check it out if you haven't already.)

There were lots of sessions that really grabbed my attention this time around, but I'd like to talk about the ones that had to do with SwiftUI.

• Yeah, I know. Everyone's using SwiftUI.
  • There was a case study on View splitting that was very helpful. Documenting rules is important, but I also thought that it's probably important to make sure the documents are easy to find.
• All about SwiftUI Navigation
  • Point-Free's talk about swiftui-navigation was very informative. I get the feeling it could be used in connections that go all the way to NavigationStack.
• Adopting SwiftUI for large-scale UIKit-based projects
  • This showed how hard it is to switch an already released app from UIKit to SwiftUI.
    Sure enough, the initial version of iOS 13 is the major problem, right?
• Making SwiftUI and UIKit get along
  • A talk about the dos-and-don'ts and how-to's for when you use a mixture of UIKit and SwiftUI. I still go back and forth between UIKit and SwiftUI a lot, so this was very helpful.

With the release of iOS 16, the minimum required operating system for many apps is now iOS 14, so I think it's time to start considering using SwiftUI full-on. That's probably why there were so many sessions about it, too. We're planning to steadily shift to SwiftUI in the future. However, keeping past OS versions in mind, we'll need to be careful because there seem to be a few issues to iron out before we can make an application with it entirely. That said, we'd also like to learn more based on what we learned here.

Kinoshita

I've gone to every iOSDC since the one in Nerima, and this year's narration was spectacular, too. When I heard That voice, the rush of nostalgia made me feel right at home.

These are the sessions from this year's iOSDC that left a memory in me:

• Starting to deliver real-time AR using Unreal Engine and iPhones

This session has stuck in my memory partly because I watched it while feeling nice and fresh in the morning, and partly because at the time, I was trying out Uaal with Flutter using Unity's libraries as part of running PoC experiments at work. I'd like to talk about Uaal with Flutter in another blog article if I get a chance.

A blog article and resources from the session's speaker can be found at the link below.

• I gave a talk at iOSDC 2022

The example in the talk used Unreal Engine instead of Unity (which has a proven track record on a variety of platforms), so it was rare and very interesting. The real-time AR synthesis demo scene at the beginning of the session was very nice, and got a lot of enthusiastic comments on Niconico, too. Personally, I think that despite the dearth of information on integrating 3D rendering software into mobile devices to make things easier to handle, there's probably a surprising demand for doing it. I didn't have a lot of information to go on when I was using Uaal with Flutter to build an app either, and had wanted to try it with Unreal Engine if it could handle it. So as I was watching the session, I was wishing I'd know about it sooner. I think it'll very interesting if metaverses get more popular worldwide and more and more knowledge about them gets pooled and shared.

Lunches and drinks weren't provided in the venue at this year's iOSDC, so I hope the COVID-19 situation settles down soon, and those lovely pickles make a welcome return. I'm looking forward to the return of an iOSDC where we enjoy a drink with the other participants. A big thank you to all the staff who worked so hard this year. Looking forward to seeing you all again next year!

Nakaguchi

I've been an iOS engineer for about 2 years, and this was my first iOSDC. I was finally getting the hang of MVVM and Combine, and wanted to make my next step learning about SwiftUI and Concurrency. This year's iOSDC had some very helpful sessions on these. There are lots of aspects that are difficult to understand from written materials like books and technical articles alone, but hearing about them in the presentations made some of them a lot clearer. I want to review the presentations to deepen my understanding.

• Yeah, I know. Everyone's using SwiftUI.

This session had a presentation that focused on splitting in SwiftUI. This part is tricky because there's no one right answer for where to do the split, so I found it very helpful.

Important takeaways for me included "Put things into words" and "Document the rules on a by-project basis," and I felt it that for parts everyone has trouble with, it's all the more necessary to explain things clearly.

• The basics for understanding reactive programming in the Swift Concurrency era

As I said above, I'd just started learning about Concurrency, and still couldn't really see why it was useful in the first place. The session also clarified where you can switch from mobile app reactive programming to Concurrency and where you can't, so I felt much happier about that, too. I'd like to use Concurrency as much as possible due to its high readability, so I plan to keep on referring to this presentation.

Conclusion

iOSDC Japan 2022 was great fun!
Hope to see you all again at iOSDC Japan 2023!
If you can't wait until then, go and check out KINTO Technologies Careers.
We're not just looking for engineers.
Also hope to meet some of you after you join us here!