Hello everyone!

It's been about six months since the last one of these, and a lot has changed — including the address this email is coming from. More on that in a second. First, the thing I'm most proud of right now.

Back in December I wrote about rebuilding MistKit from scratch — a 10-year-old CloudKit framework, redone in three months with Claude Code. Here's where that's gotten since: MistKit is closing in on 1.0, it's at 248 GitHub stars, and 1.0.0-beta.2 shipped at the end of May.

MistKit: the road to 1.0

The pitch hasn't changed: CloudKit is a great backend, right up until you need to reach it from somewhere that isn't an Apple device. MistKit is the Swift package that closes that gap — talking to CloudKit Web Services from Android, Windows, Linux, and server-side Swift.

What's happened since the rebuild is the unglamorous, important part — turning a working prototype into something you'd actually trust in production:

• beta.1 stabilized the core — CRUD, query pagination, authentication, typed errors.
• beta.2 filled in what a real backend reaches for next: push notifications and subscriptions (yes, APNs registration from a Linux server), a full Zones API for sync and change tracking, batch operations that auto-chunk so you're not hand-managing CloudKit's limits, and a pass of type-safety hardening so conversion failures are loud instead of silently wrong.

It's the same code behind my "CloudKit as Your Backend" talk at Swift Craft last month, and it's the backend I'm building my own next projects on (Bushel and a new app I'll get to below). alpha.1 landed back in November — so 1.0 is the end of an eight-month haul, and it's finally in sight.

👉 MistKit 1.0.0-beta.2 release notes · the repo

If you're doing anything with CloudKit — or you've ever been told "that only works on Apple's SDKs" — I'd genuinely love for you to get this a try before 1.0 and tell me where it falls short.

Things that changed (and why this email looks different)

While we're catching up, two bigger shifts since you last heard from me:

The podcast is back, too. EmpowerApps returned with Episode 204 in early June after about ten months away, and it hasn't stopped — we're already through Episode 208, with guests like Joannis Orlandos (Swift on robots and drones) and Joe Fabisevich along the way. You can catch up at empowerapps.show or brightdigit.com. Two of those episodes are about WWDC — which brings me to the biggest thing in the ecosystem this month.

And the address: if this email looks different, it is. BrightDigit's newsletter has moved from Mailchimp to Buttondown. You're getting this because you subscribed at brightdigit.com — nothing for you to do, just a cleaner home for these going forward.

What I made of WWDC 2026

WWDC was a few weeks ago, and after last year's big swings it looked like a refinement year on the surface — iOS 27 as a Snow Leopard–style cleanup. Underneath, though, was the one swing I actually care about: Apple opened up Foundation Models. The on-device model got real reasoning and tool-calling, there's a new Private Cloud Compute tier, and — the part that made me sit up — first-party Swift packages from Anthropic and Google, so you can drop Claude or Gemini in behind the same LanguageModel protocol and swap providers with a single SwiftPM change. Add MLX becoming a first-class citizen and agentic coding built straight into Xcode 27, and it's the most serious Apple has been about giving Swift developers real, swappable, on-device-to-cloud AI infrastructure.

I did three episodes digging into it.

• Episode 206 with Peter Witham is our yearly tradition of first reactions to the Platforms State of Union.
• Episode 207 with Cihat Gündüz — who runs WWDC Notes — is the full breakdown: which APIs matter, which to wait for the .1 on, which sessions are worth your time.
• Episode 208 with Joe Fabisevich (Plinky, Boutique) is the honest AI-assisted-development conversation — how two indie devs actually use these tools day to day, no hype and no doom — plus where Apple really stands.

All of them are up now at empowerapps.show and brightdigit.com.

What else shipped while it was quiet

None of the MistKit progress happened in a vacuum. Almost everything I shipped this spring came out of the same habit: building real apps on my own libraries, then fixing whatever breaks.

• SundialKit v2 — a ground-up rearchitecture into a plugin family: a SundialKitCore of protocols and typed errors, two interchangeable reactive backends (SundialKitStream for async/await, SundialKitCombine for Combine), and an opt-in SundialKitContext so you only link @Observable if you want it. It exists because I needed reliable Watch-to-iPhone sync for a real app, and the old design wasn't cutting it. That reliability work landed as ContextEngine in SundialKitStream. (Turns out updateApplicationContext confirms the call succeeded, not that your watch actually got the data. That's a distributed-systems problem wearing an iOS costume.) → releases

• AtLeast — the app driving all of that: a watchOS "at least X minutes" timer that rewards you with silence once you've done enough. Now in beta on TestFlight → atleast.app.
• swift-build — the GitHub Action that turns 100+ lines of Swift CI into five, now through v1.5.7, covering everything from visionOS to Windows Server to WebAssembly.

• MonthBar — my little macOS menu-bar app for seeing how much of the month is left (handy for pacing your AI token budget) is out now → month.bar.
• Celestra — and the thing I'm building next: an RSS reader (on SyndiKit + MistKit) that uses Apple's Foundation Models to suggest what's actually worth reading. Still early — more when there's something to show.

One bit of community news worth a mention while we're here: the Swift Package Index is joining Apple. It's become essential infrastructure for how we all find and trust Swift packages, so it's good to see it land somewhere with the resources to keep it going.

If you are interested in learning more, check out the episode we did with Dave Verwer and Sven Schmidt a few years ago to learn more.

Where you can find me this summer

I gave the MistKit / CloudKit-as-backend talk at Swift Craft (Folkestone) in May — the recording isn't out yet, but it'll land on the Swift Craft YouTube channel, and I'll share it the moment it does. Still ahead:

• 🇺🇸 Beer City Code — Grand Rapids, Aug 14–15 (The Automation Stack + Vibe Coding)
• 🇬🇧 iOSDevUK — Aberystwyth, Wales, Sept 7–10 (CloudKit as Your Backend)

If you'll be at either, find me — the hallway track is my favorite part.

One ask: let's talk

Consulting is open again, and I mean it. If you've got a Swift project that's stuck — CI/CD, CloudKit / server-side Swift, package architecture, SwiftData, or figuring out where AI tooling actually helps — I'd love to help.

Book a free 30-minute consult, no funnel, no pitch: zcal.co/leogdion/consultation

Or just hit reply and tell me what you're stuck on. If I can help, I'll tell you how. If I can't, I'll point you at someone who can.

Coming up

Now that I'm back on a regular cadence, the next couple of issues each go deep on one thing instead of cramming it all in here. First up: my AI-assisted-development conversation with Joe Fabisevich — the honest version of where this tooling actually is in 2026. After that, AtLeast's public beta — the little watch app that kicked off all the reliability work. Both soon.

It's good to be back. Reply and tell me what you've been building these last six months — I read every one.

Happy building!

— Leo

Leo Dion · BrightDigit · empowerapps.show · @brightdigit · YouTube · leogdion@brightdigit.com