Best of iOS — November 2025

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   Article

   Hacker News·27w

   Snapchat/Valdi: Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance without sacrificing developer velocity.

   Valdi is an open-source cross-platform UI framework from Snapchat that compiles TypeScript components directly to native iOS, Android, and macOS views without web views or JavaScript bridges. Battle-tested in Snap's production apps for 8 years, it features automatic view recycling, instant hot reload, full VSCode debugging, and flexible integration with existing native codebases. The framework includes a C++ layout engine, worker thread support, native animations, and type-safe bindings between TypeScript and platform-specific code.

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   Article

   Emerge Tools·26w

   Reaper - An open-source SDK for finding dead code

   Sentry open-sourced Reaper, an SDK for detecting dead code in iOS and Android apps through runtime analysis. Unlike static analysis tools, Reaper monitors actual user sessions to identify code that's never executed in production. The iOS version leverages Objective-C and Swift runtime metadata to track type initialization with zero runtime overhead. The Android version instruments bytecode at build time, injecting tracking calls into class initializers. Both implementations allow teams to aggregate usage data across app versions and safely identify unused code for deletion, helping manage codebase complexity and technical debt.

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   Article

   Grab Tech Blog·27w

   Grab's Mac Cloud Exit supercharges macOS CI/CD

   Grab migrated their macOS CI/CD infrastructure from a US-based cloud vendor to a colocation facility in Southeast Asia, scaling from 1 Mac Pro to 250+ Mac minis. The migration achieved $2.4M in projected three-year savings and 20-40% performance improvements by reducing network latency to Git servers. The team evaluated cloud vs colocation vs on-premises options, chose Malaysia for its data center infrastructure and energy costs, and implemented zero-touch provisioning using Jamf MDM. The bare-metal approach avoided virtualization overhead while maintaining stability, with progressive migration ensuring no disruption to their 8 iOS apps serving millions of users.

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   Article

   ByteByteGo·26w

   How Tinder Decomposed Its iOS Monolith App Handling 70M Users

   Tinder successfully decomposed its massive iOS monolith serving 70M users by using compiler-driven dependency analysis to create a modular architecture. The team built automated tools that extracted the dependency graph from Swift compiler data, then systematically moved files in phases starting with leaf nodes. This approach reduced build times by 78% and completed the migration in 6 months instead of an estimated 12 years, all without causing production incidents. The process involved updating dependencies, imports, access controls, and dependency injection patterns for each moved file.

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