The GDS Way and its content is intended for internal use by the GDS Digital Products community.

Swift style guide

We use Swift for iOS development at GDS because it’s the recommended language for building iOS apps. The preference for predominantly using SwiftUI or UIKit should be based on the needs of the project - mixing both SDKs in one project to utilise the strengths of both is completely fine.

Swift is not currently used outside of iOS development at GDS - even though it is used for backend development in the wider industry, we prefer using other programming languages for backend development.

Swift can now also be used for Android development, however Kotlin is the preferred choice.

As a result, this guide may lean towards iOS-specific tools and conventions.

Code style and formatting

For naming conventions, the Swift API Design Guidelines lays out best practices for naming conventions in Swift.

SwiftLint

SwiftLint is used for linting Swift code. The default rules are based on the styling accepted by the Swift community.

This page was last reviewed on 30 January 2026. It needs to be reviewed again on 30 July 2026 by the page owner #mobile-community .