Inside iMessage Extensions — The Quirky World Of Apple’s Niche Development Tools
A few months ago, I built and iMessage Extension. My first ever iMessage extension. I wanted to improve my Swift and SwiftUI skills after having done a couple of mobile apps in React Native. I decided to go with an iMessage Extension, because you can only write it with Xcode and you can’t really use React Native — or at least it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I wanted a deep dive into the Apple development ecosystem.
My app is called “Together To Do” and is a simple to do list inside Apple’s iMessage. I built the app as my wife used to send me text messages with comma separated items that I should buy from the grocery store.
What my wife used to send me:
Can you please also buy milk, bananas, toilet paper, replacement shoe strings for me, gray bred, toast, a box of water bottles
I felt this was somewhat annoying and hard to work through. All I wanted was a checkable list instead of the text message. With this challenge, I started to research the implementation options in iMessage.
iMessage Extension basics and boilerplate
As I’m a pragmatic and practical person, I launched Xcode and started with the boilerplate for iMessage extensions. To my surprise, it still uses Storyboards…
