AppForce1 Worklog: Refactoring an 8-Year-Old iOS App is Like Restoring a Classic Car

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Jeroen shares his real-world iOS development journey working on a legacy app at Dawn Technologies. He details his systematic approach to modernizing an 8-year-old codebase that serves as a critical tool for companies.

• Breaking down a monolithic App Delegate into dedicated managers with single responsibilities
• Leveraging the existing feature flag system to safely deploy new implementations
• Refactoring the walkie-talkie functionality with real-time audio streaming over WebSockets
• Completely rewriting the chat system to use a modern service-based architecture
• Overhauling the location tracking system to use iOS 17's new async location tracking APIs
• Implementing WiFi settings fixes for iOS 16 compatibility using modern APIs
• Maintaining a cleanup branch to remove deprecated APIs and fix compiler warnings

Check out Do iOS, the iOS development conference I'm organizing later this year. Visit do-ios.com for more information and tickets - link in the show notes.

Join me in Amsterdam for Do iOS 2025, tickets and details available now.

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