peterbamuhigire/ios-stability-solutions

iOS Stability Solutions Guide

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Use When

• Crash-prevention and production stability patterns for iOS. Use when hardening an app, designing features for stability, or building a TDD safety net around critical business logic.
• The task needs reusable judgment, domain constraints, or a proven workflow rather than ad hoc advice.

Do Not Use When

• The task is unrelated to ios-stability-solutions or would be better handled by a more specific companion skill.
• The request only needs a trivial answer and none of this skill's constraints or references materially help.

Required Inputs

• Gather relevant project context, constraints, and the concrete problem to solve.
• Confirm the desired deliverable: design, code, review, migration plan, audit, or documentation.

Workflow

• Read this SKILL.md first, then load only the referenced deep-dive files that are necessary for the task.
• Apply the ordered guidance, checklists, and decision rules in this skill instead of cherry-picking isolated snippets.
• Produce the deliverable with assumptions, risks, and follow-up work made explicit when they matter.

Quality Standards

• Keep outputs execution-oriented, concise, and aligned with the repository's baseline engineering standards.
• Preserve compatibility with existing project conventions unless the skill explicitly requires a stronger standard.
• Prefer deterministic, reviewable steps over vague advice or tool-specific magic.

Anti-Patterns

• Treating examples as copy-paste truth without checking fit, constraints, or failure modes.
• Loading every reference file by default instead of using progressive disclosure.

Outputs

• A concrete result that fits the task: implementation guidance, review findings, architecture decisions, templates, or generated artifacts.
• Clear assumptions, tradeoffs, or unresolved gaps when the task cannot be completed from available context alone.
• References used, companion skills, or follow-up actions when they materially improve execution.

References

• Use the links and companion skills already referenced in this file when deeper context is needed.

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Patterns for creating stable, crash-free iOS apps. Synthesised from iOS Developer Solutions Guide (Narendar Singh Saini).

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1. The Three Error Classes — Prevent Each Differently

The book classifies all iOS bugs into three classes with distinct prevention strategies:

Class 1 — Syntax / Compile-time Errors

Prevention: Master the language. Gaps in Swift knowledge directly cause compile errors. Key areas: functional operators (map, filter, flatMap, reduce, compactMap), all initialiser types (designated, convenience, required, failable init?, throwable init throws), property types (stored, lazy stored, computed, observers, wrappers), optional unwrapping hierarchy, protocols, generics, async/await.

Class 2 — Logical Errors (Silent, Dangerous)

Prevention: TDD. These compile and run but produce wrong output. They survive manual QA. Users report them after release. Only unit test cases reliably catch them.

Class 3 — Runtime Errors (Crashes, Business-Critical)

Prevention: Optional safety + throwable functions + do-catch coverage (see Section 2).

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Additional Guidance

Extended guidance for ios-stability-solutions was moved to references/skill-deep-dive.md to keep this entrypoint compact and fast to load.

Use that deep dive for:

• 2. Optional Safety Hierarchy — Eliminate Force Unwrap
• 3. Throwable Functions for Error Propagation
• 4. Dependency Injection — The Core of Testable, Stable Code
• 5. SOLID Principles as Stability Rules
• 6. TDD Safety Net — Red-Green-Refactor
• 7. Architecture for Stability — MVVM Over Massive ViewController
• 8. Over-Engineering as a Stability Risk
• 9. UI Approach and Crash Surface Area
• 10. Framework Access Levels — Public API Hardening
• 11. Backend-Driven UI — Zero-Downtime Bug Mitigation
• 12. DRY Principle — Prevent Inconsistency Bugs
• 13. Bug Prevention Checklist