We got news that Apple has settled the App Store fee dispute with the European Union, which is good. If Apple can get out of this mess with a negotiated deal instead of years of litigation and penalties, they should consider themselves ahead of the game.

When I first saw the headline, however, I was hoping it meant a more global agreement with the European Union. I talk to European Apple enthusiasts every day in the MacSparky Labs, and they are all incredibly frustrated that Apple fails to release features in the EU that are available elsewhere.

I’m not going to pretend to know who’s to blame, but European citizens and Apple customers are the ones paying the price.

Back in my days as a lawyer, I was a party to enough ongoing negotiations to know that the people outside the negotiations have no clue what’s actually going on. But I can hope this is merely a first step and that my European Apple-using friends can get access to Siri AI sooner rather than later.

The post A Truce on App Store Fees, Still No Siri AI in Europe appeared first on MacSparky.

Four members of the SwiftUI team at Apple left the company, and now they’ve started a company that writes SwiftUI for you.

The product is Bitrig. You describe an app in plain English, and it generates real Swift and SwiftUI code. What comes out the other end is a project you can open in Xcode, read, and edit by hand. The pipeline runs all the way to TestFlight and the App Store, provisioning profiles and all.

It started as an iPhone-only app last October and now it’s on the Mac. I’ve only poked around the edges so far, but it seems like a good idea if you want some help with native app development.

I’m putting the Mac app on my machine this week to find out.

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