Put together zed-ios-app-starter, a template for native iOS apps and the fourth member of the Zed Stack. It's SwiftUI and SwiftData targeting iOS 18+, and — unusually for me — it has no third-party dependencies at all.
It ships the shell I'd otherwise rebuild every single time: a tab layout with a NavigationStack
per tab, one SwiftData @Model
wired all the way through list, detail, edit and delete, an @Observable
preferences object over UserDefaults
(because @AppStorage
only works inside a View
, which means anything a model needs ends up threaded through the view tree), a first-launch onboarding walkthrough you can replay from Settings, an animated splash over a matching launch-screen colour so there's no white flash, a theme with spacing and radius scales, and Reduce Motion and VoiceOver handling. StoreKit 2 in-app purchases and a streaming Claude API chat client are both in there but switched off by default — turn one on or delete its folder.
The bit I'm most pleased with is that adding files needs no project-file edits. The target uses an Xcode file-system synchronized group, so anything dropped into the source directory gets compiled automatically, new folders included. The only things needing a project.pbxproj
change are files that must be excluded.
There's a scaffold.sh
that copies the template to a new directory and renames everything — target, scheme, @main
struct, bundle id, StoreKit product ids — because AppStarter
becomes struct AppStarterApp
and a hyphenated repo name simply won't compile. Zero, my project factory, now does the same substitutions in CI, so type: ios
is one more option on the form.