First Glance at New Salesforce & Apple Mobile SDK 7.0

On Jan 9 2019 Apple & Salesforce announced the first-ever release of jointly developed by Apple & Salesforce Mobile SDK 7.0. Much anticipated release after DF18 announced the partnership between 2 companies. Naturally, I had to try this, and here are my initial notes.

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=01092019a

Installation with npm is simple, but the global update did not work on my Mac due to the already installed prior forceios package. I had to install it in a local directory. Generated the native Swift app and all seem to have worked. The new app was able to login to my Salesforce dev org with default login, while documentation stated now these apps must use MyDomain. That seems to be not the case.

First Impressions

Appear much faster to build an index of the project
The new SDK seems much lighter on dependencies
AppDelegate is way simpler code now
The config for consumer key and URI, scopes are now nicely stored in bootconfig.plist file
No more PromiseKit library and no heavy RESTKit dependencies
No Authentication code in AppDelegate anymore

All of these will make building apps with Swift for Salesforce much more fun. I also anticipate that we will have fewer issues to deal with when Apple releases yearly updates to XCode IDE or the new Swift version. Typically these updates make prior SDK generated apps almost unmanageable with mismatching dependencies. Often required to retrofit existing code with new tools and language features to make app releases.

This release is new and I am sure some things will come up that will need fixes, but so far it has worked well for me. If you want to try it here is a GitHub repository: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=01092019a

To learn more about iOS development with Salesforce Mobile SDK, here is a nice trail on Trailhead, Get Started with iOS App Development

Next, I wanted to test out how Push Notification and SmartStore Offline work, stay tuned for upcoming posts on these topics.