What you need to know

  • Use of Swift has doubled in iOS 13 compared to 12.
  • There are 141 binaries using Swift in iOS 13, up from 66 in iOS 12.
  • Swift was originally announced at WWDC 2014, 5 years ago.

Use of Apple's programming language Swift has vastly increased in the latest version of iOS. In iOS 13, Apple's use of Swift has more than doubled compared to iOS 12.

The programming language was originally announced at WWDC in 2014. It can be used by developers to create apps in macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS and more. Of course, it's also used by Apple inside of Apple software, and the first Swift-based iOS app was Calculator in iOS 9, back in 2015.

In this year's software, there are 141 binaries that contain Swift. This doesn't necessarily mean that an entire app is based on Swift, and it could be as little of one line of code that contains the language.

The research was carried out by blogger Timac and picked up via 9to5 Mac, which notes that much of Apple's own software is still written in Objective-C. It seems that rather than overhaul its entire software coding (no doubt a logistical nightmare), Apple is slowly choosing to phase in Swift as and when it thinks best. Afterall, if it ain't broke...

You can see the graph charting Apple's own adoption of Swift into iOS below!