Oh Swift Playground.

You know it’s bad when I, a super iPad enthusiast, have given up on this app. Whoever was championing this app at Apple clearly hasn’t been there for a while. I guess keeping this app on life support is better than nothing. But just barely.

Anywho, the Swift Playground app (version 4.7) has finally been upgraded with iOS 26 SDK, seven months after release. This means apps you build with the app will be able to take advantage of new iPadOS 26 features like the enhanced Background Tasks api and the new menu bar.

The app also gets an iPadOS 26 upgrade, with a dash of Liquid Glass across the UI. There’s even now a proper dark mode icon, which I thought already existed, but I checked my other iPads, and it doesn’t appear to have one. Weird.

There don’t appear to be any functional changes with this app.

A few things I’m noticing:

• The toolbar doesn’t seem to be customizable like it was in the previous version.
• The toolbar is also missing the button for Quick Action (accessible from the View menu)
• There are two menu entries for “Documentation” in the overflow menu, which make me wonder if one of them is supposed to be the option for configuring the toolbar.

This update is now from the App Store.

Now, excuse me while I go back to wishing this app supported building widgets. Or Apple Watch apps. Or even breakpoints for debugging.

Sigh 😔