The story
Swift Playground is Apple’s iPad app for learning to code with Swift. For years, developers and educators could publish their own playground books and apps through a subscription feed system: a structured JSON format that let anyone host content on their own domain and share it directly inside the app.
In January 2025, Apple quietly removed the ability to subscribe to external feeds from within Swift Playground. The built-in channel was gone. Educators, students, and indie developers who had been sharing content through the feed system lost their main channel for reaching learners directly inside the app.
Swiftgrounds was built to fill that gap. It’s a community-driven index where publishers can list their playground books and apps, and where learners can browse, discover, and download them. The underlying feed format is exactly the same one Apple originally designed, so any content you’ve already built works without changes.
How it works
Publishers host their own JSON feed on their own domain. Swiftgrounds never stores your content, only a pointer to it. When you submit your feed URL, the platform fetches it, parses it, and makes your playgrounds discoverable in the index. Updates to your feed sync automatically. Learners browse by difficulty, topic, or publisher, and every playground links directly to the original source. The feed format is documented in detail in the FAQ, including the full JSON schema, optional fields, and localisation support. The WWDC 2018 session from Apple is also available there, and it’s still the most comprehensive walkthrough of the format.
Who built this
Swiftgrounds was created by Ale Mohamad, an iOS developer & Swift Playground Evangelist based in Málaga, Spain.
If you’d like to contribute, report an issue, or just say hello, you can find me on X, Mastodon, Bluesky, or LinkedIn.