Swift Package Index joins Apple, and Swift developers aren't all cheering

The community's Swift package directory is now an Apple property

Swift Package Index — the de-facto place to find, compare and vet Swift packages — announced it is joining Apple. For a project long run by a small independent team, this means full-time backing and an official home inside the company that makes the language. A signal of the handoff turned up in the thread itself: one reader noted that Dave Verwer, the index's co-founder, had recently given up ownership of the long-running iOS Dev Weekly newsletter — the kind of housekeeping that precedes a move like this.

'Apple is pretty bad at open source' — the worry isn't the money

Nobody in the thread begrudges the team a salary. The unease is about what Apple does with infrastructure once it owns it.

"Apple is pretty bad at open source and developer services both, and they explicitly call out developer identity as a future direction, which doesn't fill me with hope." — a Swift developer reacting to the roadmap

A longtime Apple-platform engineer raised the gatekeeping question directly: now that the index is an official Apple brand, he expects pressure to curate it — and "caterwaulin'" when Apple starts deciding which packages get indexed. Another reader put the emotional version more bluntly, having hoped the Swift ecosystem might emancipate itself from Apple rather than get absorbed.

Why Apple wants this: Swift's bid to be a server language

Not everyone read it as a loss. One developer placed the move inside Apple's longer game of pushing Swift beyond the iPhone.

"Apple has something with Swift similar to what Google has with Go … Having a thriving opensource (starting with a package index) makes a lot of sense to them." — a developer comparing Swift's server push to Go

There was even an opportunity in it. A reader who'd been mulling a competing index — annoyed that SPI only supports GitHub repositories — said the acquisition settled the question for him: he was "starting the engines" on a rival. So the practical takeaway cuts both ways. A directory that was neutral by virtue of being independent now answers to the platform owner, and the people most invested in Swift are split on whether that buys stability or a future veto over what counts as a Swift package.