Tutorials about Apple Watch development with WatchKit, SwiftUI, and other related watchOS frameworks.
Xcode 12 and watchOS 7 are not perfect, but they are much better than their immediate predecessors and I would say are about as capable as pre-SwiftUI WatchKit. I am confident that adopting this for any new Apple Watch app is the right decision.
This tutorial will use Xcode to make a minimal Apple Watch app. But, before you move on, it's a good idea to understand what it did so that you'll know how to add to it later.
If you already tried out SwiftUI on the iPhone, most of what you know works the same on the watch. If you haven't, here are simple recreations of user interfaces in two of the built-in Apple Watch apps.
In the last article, we drew the initial state of the the Breathe app. Now let's learn how to animate it.
In iOS, we use UINavigationViewController from UIKit to create a hierarchical navigation structure. Using it, we can push views onto the view controller stack, and we automatically get a back button to take us back.
UIKit and this class are not available to Apple watch developers, and so before SwiftUI, watch app developers used WKInterfaceController's pushController method and Storyboards.
Luckily, this is easier in SwiftUI.
NavigationLink has built in functionality to manage the presentation and dismissal of the subview, and automatically puts a back button on the screen for you.
But, sometimes, there is a reason to send the user back to the calling view based on other things they do. In UIKit, we'd call dismiss, but in SwiftUI, we don't call methods on views to change them, we change state and let the view get re-rendered.
On the Apple Watch, it's possible to have a set of screens that are peers to each other. You get to each page with left and right swipes. The bottom of the screen has a dot for each page in the set, with the current one lit up.
If you are targeting watchOS 6, and you have several possible root views, then you define each in a Storyboard and you need to navigate between them outside of SwiftUI.