What’s new in SwiftData

A Podkey summary of What’s new in SwiftData, from WWDC 2026.SwiftData’s getting a few really practical upgrades, and they mostly come down to one theme: less glue code, more direct ways to observe and organize your data. The big pieces here are sectioned queries for cleaner SwiftUI lists, codable attributes for awkward external types, and new observer APIs that let apps react to changes even outside the usual view layer. There are a couple of important catches too, especially around codable storage and observation lifetimes, so this is one of those updates where the convenience is real, but you do want to know where the edges are.Sectioned queries get simplerCodable attributes help with external typesThe codable tradeoff is very realResultsObserver brings query-style updates outside SwiftUIThe observation token is the whole contractHistoryObserver watches changes from outside the roomWhy this batch of changes mattersThis podcast was created with Podkey. Make your own at https://podkey.fm