The Ares iPhone apps
Five native iPhone apps on one shared account, written in SwiftUI. Each works in English and German, in light and
dark, and on made-up sample data for trying it without an account.
See them on patrikbreeck.com
More pictures with captions: showcase/.
Shared by every app
- One account. Logging in to one app logs in to all of them, through a shared Keychain group, and logging out
ends it everywhere. Each app asks for its own access; accounts are created and run from inside any app.
- Push. One service on the server sends every app's notifications.
- The same Settings. Language, appearance, notifications, a contact form, the legal pages, the account.
- Private when switching apps. A cover hides the screen in the app switcher.
How it's built
- SwiftUI for iOS 26 and later, with Apple's frameworks only (Swift Charts, SwiftData, WidgetKit, Vision,
JavaScriptCore, Core Spotlight) and no third-party packages.
- One Xcode project per app.
Shared/ (login, network, push, settings, design) is compiled into every one of them.
- Each app talks to its own server's JSON API. Aresium also runs the server's TypeScript engine on the iPhone, in
JavaScriptCore, so phone and server count alike.
- Every text lives in String Catalogs, in English and German.
- A sample mode (
-sampleData) shows each app on made-up data with no server. scripts/showcase.py makes the
pictures above from it.
Run it
Open an app's project in Xcode 27 (for example Aresium/Aresium.xcodeproj), choose an iOS 26 simulator, and add
-sampleData to the scheme's launch arguments to look around without an account. Tests:
xcodebuild test -project Aresium/Aresium.xcodeproj -scheme Aresium -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 17'
The layout, push and releasing to TestFlight: docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.
