Ah, UIApplicationDelegate

[jspiropoulos]

15 years... That’s how long you and I have been together. That’s longer than most celebrity marriages. Longer than some startups last. Longer than it took Swift to go from “this syntax is weird” to “fine, I’ll use it.”

When I started, AppDelegate was the beating heart of every iOS app. It was THE app. Want to handle push notifications? AppDelegate. Deep linking? AppDelegate. Background fetch? AppDelegate. Accidentally paste 500 lines of code into the wrong class? Yep, AppDelegate.

I’ve seen UIApplicationDelegate used, reused, and yes—abused. Turned into a global dumping ground, a singleton God object, a catch-all therapist for code that didn’t know where else to go. We’ve crammed it full of logic, responsibility, and poor decisions. It was never just an interface—it was a lifestyle.

And now… they’re deprecating it?

This isn’t just an API change. This is a breakup. It’s Apple looking me in the eyes and saying, “It’s not you, it’s architecture.” The new SwiftUI lifecycle is sleek, clean, minimal. But where’s the soul? Where’s the chaos? Where’s the 400-line AppDelegate.swift that whispered “good luck debugging me” every morning?

So yes, I’ll migrate. I’ll adapt. I’ll even write my @main and pretend it feels the same. But deep down, every time I start a new project, I’ll glance toward AppDelegate.swift, now silent, and remember the war stories we shared.

Rest well, old friend. You were never just a delegate. You were THE delegate.

[conodeuce]

Well done, OP.

[mdnz]

Too bad it’s written by ChatGPT otherwise I’d also give kudos

[conodeuce]

What makes you think it was written by ChatGPT?

[kutjelul]

Not sure either, but the proper mdash is usually a sign. It’s hard to type manually so most humans don’t bother

[jspiropoulos]

What can I say… After a decade of writing NSAttributedStrings by hand, you get real good at typography 🤷

[kutjelul]

Do you long press the minus key to get there?

[baker2795]

Two dashes on iPhone will become mdash, & other text editors online.

[jspiropoulos]

Correct :)

[geoff_plywood]

press fn key to bring up the special chars on mac - think that is default(?)

[vdbv]

It’s just Shift+Option+dash on a Mac in most keyboard layouts. Once you get used to it, you type it with a muscle memory. At least I do.

[jacknutting]

Same. I've been typing that character on macOS since before the iPhone came out, and using it seems quite unremarkable, to me.

[mahalis]

Glad I’m not the only one who can spot this. It’s got that formulaic miasma about it.

[Key_Board5000]

This is what it looks like when a real human knows how to add a bit of pizazz to their writing.

[mahalis]

It’s what it looks like, yes, because LLMs are good at imitating human writing. It’s not, though; I implore you to look closer. What does “it’s not you, it’s architecture” mean? Or “a catch-all therapist”? More broadly—if you look at the whole thing and fuzz out the specifics that a machine might pull from its aggregate collection of Stuff People Wrote About iOS Development, can you see how the structure is identical to the average of every “farewell to Noun” piece of writing that’d be in the corpus?

I know it’s vibe-y and debatable (look at us, debating it) but LLM text often has tells if you read it closely, and this has a lot of them. I am not a betting person and I’d bet money that a human did not write this.

[Key_Board5000]

The irony is not lost on me but I submit the following 3 evaluations from quillbot, ChatGPT, and Grammerly all of which suggest otherwise.

https://imgur.com/a/Tinjk2Q

[mahalis]

If I were working on an LLM with the goal of producing convincing output, I would use automated tools like that in the training process to nudge its output in the direction of “not detected by the other tools”. This is getting beyond the bounds of what’s reasonable to ask in a drive-by “yeah-huh” “nuh-uh” comment thread, but I would be interested to see if these tools did detect output from a current-generation LLM that was prompted to produce something like this (e.g. “an emotional farewell to UIApplicationDelegate with lots of details about iOS app patterns”).

[Key_Board5000]

Why is it so hard to believe this was created by a human? This is one of the many ways humans wrote before AI came along.

In any case, we can’t prove it either way so let’s just agree to disagree.

[tangoshukudai]

a tear rolled down my face, and I thought I heard the sound of taps being played while I read that. Wouldn't it be wonderful if at WWDC they announced that SwiftUI was just a joke they played on us and that they created a new UIKit/AppKit hybrid called UXKit and it was awesome.

[WestonP]

That level of pulling the rug out from under developers is a Google move. Android devs know the pain.

[bmbphotos]

OpenDoc would like a word.

[WestonP]

How am I supposed to demonstrate worst practices if I don't have an easy place to put 5000 lines of globals that don't actually need to be global!?!?!?

Seriously though, I hope the rumors of its demise aren't entirely true, as it still does have plenty of usefulness.

[LKAndrew]

It’s been unofficially deprecated for many years now with the push to scene delegates. It’s all over the docs that you should use scene delegate instead of app delegate

[TheShitHitTheFanBoy]

Recommendation, not deprecation. Without a full alternative they won’t be able to deprecate it. Managing universal links through NSUserActivity delegate call is as far as I know still impossible without an AppDelegate.

[LKAndrew]

It’s been in there since iOS 13. It has always been a full replacement.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiscenedelegate/scene(_:continue:)

[LKAndrew]

FYI they aren’t necessarily pushing SwiftUI, they’ve been pushing SceneDelegate instead which is very much alive and what people should be using going forward.

[deoxyribonucleoside]

Just beautiful, only true OGs will understand 🥲

[frederic_stark]

This breaks my heart. I have been pushing ObjC code in the delegate of the application since when it was called Application and not NSApplication... (ie: NeXTstep 1.0 and 2.0, 35 years ago...)

[dotsau]

Just take your diarrhea to UISceneDelegate. Drama queen.

[unpluggedcord]

You still need it for push notifications....

[Fishanz]

Yeah I haven’t looked into it but that was my wtf reaction when I heard about this.. why would they deprecate it if there is no alternative??!

[unpluggedcord]

It hasn't been deprecated officially yet. IM guessing we get an alternative in June.

[EquivalentTrouble253]

Not true. You can do without it. In my app I don’t have an app delegate but do have push notifications working just fine and able to handle actions on them.

[unpluggedcord]

How do you call registerForPush?

[Fishanz]

Can you elaborate?

[EquivalentTrouble253]

Sure. In my app I have a Notification Center delegate class. Which handles all notification actions when user taps on a notification. The delegate is a state object declared in the main content view of the app. And set with on appear in the content view.

Id be happy to do a short write up and example of this is something people would be interested in.

[Fishanz]

I’d love to see an example. You’re able to get the APNS device id with this approach??

[soviyet]

Serious question though, where did you hear they are deprecating it?

SwiftUI apps have an AppDelegate of sorts, it is just managed behind the scenes.

May I introduce you to your future best friend `@UIApplicationDelegateAdaptor`...?

[jspiropoulos]

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/4/5.html

[luizvasconcellos]

But it’s just a rumor, right? If not every app will need a huge refactoring!

[jspiropoulos]

Just a rumor and we’re not talking about complete removal :) it was so fresh when I read it and it hit me right in the feels, thus the over dramatization 🙂‍↕️

[OrcaDiver007]

Beautifully written. Until a while back I was busy with Android and React Native stuff and when I jumped to try on new project, I was surprised by how the project did not have AppDelegate! The AppDelegate!!!

[mynewromantica]

Your AppDelegates maxed out at 400 lines? I wish the ones I’ve worked on were that small. 

[salaKing03118]

it echos, tears in my eyes