It's not easy, it's necessary

It's now almost 10 years since I wrote my first app using Swift. It was a tiny AppKit app for the Mac, a little something to remind me to drink water during the day. I didn't know it back then, but this would be the first of dozens of apps and tools I will be making for Apple devices in the years that followed.

UIKit, CoreData, Cobine, SwiftUI and hundreds of other frameworks now live rent-free at the back of my mind, ready to become available when needed. I've made a career out of this. Helping fellow indie developers whenever I can, building and sharing tools and libraries, helping the ecosystem move forward, talking about it on meetups and any other venue where the opportunity exists to talk about what I love.

Unfortunately, this is not an inspirational post. The time has come to realize that Apple as an organization is actively supporting the authoritarian regime in the USA through their various donations and continued posting of ads and content on the X platform.

This is not a case of a local bipartisan misunderstanding one could dismiss with the #uspol hashtag. This is a global effort of misinformation and eradication of decades of human rights, economic and environmental progress.

As a European citizen, I find it impossible to continue.

Matt calls in leverage, the feedback boycott approach.

And here is how I plan to join the effort:

• I will no longer install pre-release versions of any Apple developer tools, operating systems or apps.
• I will no longer submit radars or attempt to troubleshoot Swift tooling errors.
• I will disable telemetry and diagnostics for my personal Apple devices, as well as the fleet of lab devices I use for development.

As Swift (a project controlled by Apple on project level) continues to build their community on X, I'm also suspending my contributions which are mainly:

• I will not be building new FOSS tools and packages using Swift.
• Existing open-source tools will remain in a sort of “maintenance mode”, at least for now, and unreleased projects will linger suspended.
• My consultancy and advisory positions will no longer offer or support Swift related solutions for consideration.

It goes without saying, but I want to be clear that this is not a message towards the wonderful humans working at Apple. They're amazing and brilliant, and I even call some of them my friends. I'm very grateful to have been able to learn from them and collaborate with them. I understand the conflicting situation they find themselves in, but unfortunately, someone else is plotting the course for them.

Stand your ground.