Migrating my SwiftUI App to VisionOS in 2 Hours

How I migrated my SwiftUI app CrossCraft to support visionOS for the Day 1 Release of the Apple Vision Pro. It took effectively about 2 hours in total, this article summarizes my key learnings along the way.

Just a few months ago, I released CrossCraft: Custom Crosswords, an app written entirely in SwiftUI and available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. For the launch of the Vision Pro, I set myself a challenge to migrate it to the new visionOS platform — but I started the migration just 3 days before launch day!

So the question was if I would be able to pull it off in this short amount of time. But luckily it turned out to be easy enough, so my app was ready on Day 1! 👇

The official email from Apple, thanking Day 1 app developers.

The following are all of my learnings that could help you migrate your apps, too!

3rd-Party Frameworks

After adding the “Apple Vision” destination to my project, the first thing I did was selecting the “Apple Vision Pro” simulator and starting a build.

As I was expecting, the build failed. Because not all frameworks support the visionOS platform yet. But adding basic support was easy. Here are the 4 steps:

Step 2: Adjusting the Package.swift file is the most important step.

1. Fork the dependency, remove it from your project & add your fork with the main branch instead.
2. Open the Package.swift file in the fork, bump the Swift tools version at the top of the file to 5.9 and add .visionOS(.v1) to the supported platforms array.
3. Search for any mentions of #if os(iOS) and change them to #if os(iOS) || os(visionOS) to avoid building the macOS path, preferring the iOS path.