Apple releases long-awaited Swift Playgrounds 4 with a ton of updates

The long-awaited Swift Playgrounds 4 lets you create and upload apps to the App Store directly from your iPad!

What you need to know

Apple release Swift Playgrounds 4
App Store Connect lets you upload your app directly to the App Store on your device.
With iPadOS 15.2, you can build apps with SwiftUI right on your iPad

Swift Playgrounds is Apple’s educational and development for apps that you can use right on your iPad, and it has just released Swift Playgrounds 4 with some significant upgrades!

According to the update log on the App Store, these are the major new features you can expect from Swift Playgrounds 4:

Build iPhone and iPad apps with SwiftUI right on your iPad (requires iPadOS 15.2 or later)
App Store Connect integration lets you upload your finished app to the App Store
App Preview shows live updates as you make changes to your app
Full-screen preview lets you see your app edge-to-edge
Smart, inline code suggestions help you write code quickly and accurately
App Projects make it easy to move projects to Xcode and back
Project-wide search finds results across multiple files
Snippets Library provides hundreds of SwiftUI controls, symbols, and colors
Swift Package support lets you include publicly-available code to enhance your apps

Apple originally announced the fourth generation of Swift Playgrounds, its Swift programming app for beginners, at WWDC21 earlier this year with the promise to allow iPad users to create and publish apps all from the device itself.

You can download Swift Playgrounds 4 right now, but remember to download and install the newest iPadOS 15.2 software first. One thing’s for sure, and there’s never been a better time to try coding on your iPad than right now with Swift Playgrounds 4.