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Understanding Redux for iOS: Beyond the Web Hype


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Karan Pal

Understanding Redux for iOS: Beyond the Web Hype

🎧 Great for listening while coding!

You know that moment when you add “just one more feature” and suddenly your app’s state is everywhere?

I was debugging this nightmare last night where user data was showing different values on different screens. Same user, same session, completely different data. Sound familiar?

📱 The State Problem Every iOS Developer Faces

It starts innocent enough. A simple app with @State here, @Observable there. Clean, Apple-approved, everything’s fine.

Then your app grows.

Suddenly you’re passing state down through five levels of views. Your observable objects are getting massive because they’re handling everything from user data to network requests to UI state. Different screens show different versions of the same data because they’re all maintaining their own copies.

🔄 What Redux Actually Is (No Web Jargon)

Redux isn’t some mystical web framework thing. It’s actually a pretty simple pattern: instead of having state scattered all over your app, you put it all in one place. One single source of truth.

But here’s where it gets clever – you can’t just randomly change that state from anywhere. If you want to update something, you have to send a message describing what you want to happen. These messages are called “actions.”

// Instead of scattered state everywhere
class UserProfileModel: ObservableObject { /* ... */ }
class MainFeedModel: ObservableObject { /* ... */ }
class CartModel: ObservableObject { /* ... */ }

// You get one predictable flow
struct AppState {
    var user: User?
    var feed: [Post]
    var cart: Cart
}

⚖ When Redux Makes Sense (And When It Doesn’t)

Redux shines when you need data to flow between unrelated parts of your app. Shopping cart that affects navigation badges, product lists, and checkout flows? Perfect.

Simple calculator app where each screen does its own thing? Overkill.

🧠 The Mental Model Shift

This is where Redux clicks or doesn’t click for most people. Instead of thinking “this view owns this data,” you think “the app owns all data, views just display what they need.”

Your views become pure functions: given some state, show this UI. Given a user interaction, dispatch this action. That’s it.

🚀 What’s Next

In the next article, I’ll show you how to build a complete Redux system from scratch – no third-party libraries, just pure Swift and SwiftUI. We’ll cover async operations, navigation state, and all those edge cases that tutorials usually skip.

Read the complete explanation: https://medium.com/swift-pal/understanding-redux-for-ios-beyond-the-web-hype-1814ef8037ff

Connect with me:

How do you handle complex state in your SwiftUI apps? Are you dealing with the scattered state problem? Let me know in the comments!


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Karan Pal