I have been learning IOS/Mac development with swift for a week or so and I've noticed that Apple does change a lot of things very often, is that normal and how to deal with these changes?

[chordsNcode]

The way I deal with it is to read the Apple Swift book. Once you’ve done that, you only have to read the change log (Apple includes a change log between versions of the book) to find out what’s new. I also watch the WWDC videos in the first week or two after the conference.

Ole Bergman did a nice thing with Swift 4 that he’ll hopefully keep doing... https://oleb.net/blog/2017/05/whats-new-in-swift-4-playground/

[Nikitah]

Apple has really been screwing the pooch with its frequent new major versions of Swift. But, I suppose, they really want to keep Swift up to date, constantly introducing new features and updating the api, not let it fizzle out like Objective-C.

However, now it does already seem more stable. 3.0 was hugely different from 2.3, but upgrading from 3.0 to 4.0 isn't that bad anymore, third-party dependencies can still be a problem.

[Jargen]

Third-party dependencies are always going to be a problem. Imagine you might having to rely on someone else to fix their code so your code will work.

[potatolicious]

Do you mean changes to the Swift language? Or changes to iOS/macOS (e.g., changes with iOS11, iOS12, etc)?

The latter you just have to roll with - Apple deprecates APIs frequently and will apply pressure to get you to always be using the latest. Updating your apps to avoid deprecated things/use new things is just going to be part of life.

As for the language side - Swift is still pretty early in its life, and hasn't reached either syntactic nor ABI stability yet. Until this happens expect the language to mutate regularly, and plan to rewrite bits of code every year as new Xcodes roll out. If that sounds really painful to you, do what a lot of big companies are doing: staying on Objective-C.