Observation: The Gotchas

Brandon: And theoretically it would even be possible to backport all of this code to work on iOS 16 and earlier. However, you wouldn’t be able to backport the SwiftUI support. That unfortunately requires iOS 17.

Stephen: OK, we have no gone deep into the new Observation framework. We understand the problems it’s trying to solve, and see concretely just how magical it can be to use it. But we’ve also explored its primary observation tracking tool, and even dug into the actual source code to see how it the tool roughly works.

The tool is pretty incredible to use, and solves so many pain points of the original tools, but it does have some gotchas and problems of its own. It is very important to understand these downsides otherwise you can easily find yourself in a situation where you are accidentally observing far too much state.

Let’s dig in.