The Swift Library List That's Been Quietly Growing to 1,100+ Entries

You're starting a new Swift project and you need a charting library, or maybe a clean way to handle keychain access, or a dependency injection container that doesn't make you want to switch careers. You open a search engine, wade through stale Stack Overflow answers, and find three repos that haven't been touched since 2019. There's a better way to do this: a curated list that's been maintained for years and now sits at over 1,100 projects.

What It Does

Awesome Swift is a curated index of Swift libraries, guides, and tools, organized into a deep hierarchy of categories. It's part of the broader "Awesome" ecosystem (the badge at the top links back to Sindre Sorhus's original list), and it's maintained by Matteocrippa with a partnership with Codemotion.

The structure is the real story here. The list breaks down into top-level sections like Guides, Boilerplates, REPL, Editor Support, Benchmark, Converters, Dependency Managers, Patterns, and Libs. That last one — Libs — is where the bulk of the entries live, and it's subdivided into dozens of categories: Accessibility, AI, Algorithm, Analytics, Animation, API, App Routing, App Store, Audio, Augmented Reality, Authentication, Bots, Cache, Chart, Chat, Colors, Command Line, Concurrency, Currency, and that's just through the C's.

The Data Management section alone branches into CBOR, Core Data, CSV, Firebase, GraphQL, JSON, Key Value Store, MongoDB, Multi Database, ORM, Realm, SQL drivers, SQLite, TOML, XML, YAML, and ZIP. The UI section splits into Alert, Blur, Button, Calendar, Cards, Form, HUD, Label, Menu, Pagination, Payment, Permissions, Scroll Bars, and StackView, among others. There's a Linux column in the header table, so cross-platform support is tracked. The list was last updated August 03, 2026, according to the README badge.

One practical detail worth noting: the README itself says not to edit it directly. Contributions go through a CONTENTS.JSON file instead, which suggests the list is generated from structured data rather than hand-maintained markdown. That's a smart decision for a project of this size.

Why It's Cool

The category depth is genuinely useful. Most awesome lists stop at a flat list of links. This one goes three levels deep in places — Hardware splits into 3D Touch, Bluetooth, Camera (which itself splits into Barcode), Haptic Feedback, iBeacon, and Sensors. That kind of granularity means you can actually find what you need instead of scrolling through 200 unrelated entries.

It covers the unglamorous stuff. There's a section for Optimization. There's one for Quality. There's a Key Value Coding section and a Keychain subsection under Security. These aren't the categories that get a lot of attention, but they're the ones you end up needing on real projects.

The JSON-driven approach is a quiet win. By moving the source of truth to CONTENTS.JSON, the maintainers make it possible to programmatically query the list, generate different views, or build tooling on top of it. It's a small architectural choice with outsized implications for how the list can evolve.

It's not just libraries. Guides, style guides, newsletters, boilerplates, REPL tools, editor support for Emacs, Vim, and Google Colaboratory, benchmark tools, and converters are all in here. If you're learning Swift or setting up a new environment, the non-library sections are worth a look on their own.

The Linux column exists. Swift on Linux is a real thing, and having a dedicated column in the header table signals that the maintainers are thinking about it. Whether every entry is verified for Linux is unclear from the README, but the intent is there.

How to Try It

This is a reference list, not a library you install, so "trying it" means browsing it and using it to find what you need.

1. Go to the repository: https://github.com/matteocrippa/awesome-swift
2. Use the Contents section at the top of the README to jump to the category you need. The anchor links work, so you can go straight to, say, the Testing section or the Networking section without scrolling.
3. If you want to contribute, don't edit the README. The project explicitly asks you to update CONTENTS.JSON instead.
4. If you're building tooling on top of the list, the JSON file is your entry point.

There's no install command, no package to add. It's a discovery resource. Bookmark it, and the next time you're about to search for "best Swift library for X," check here first.

Final Thoughts

Awesome Swift isn't trying to be clever. It's a list, and it does the list thing well. The value is in the maintenance — 1,100+ entries organized into a structure that someone has clearly put thought into, with a JSON backend that makes it more than just a markdown file. If you write Swift regularly, this belongs in your bookmarks. If you're new to Swift, the Guides and Boilerplates sections are a reasonable place to start orienting yourself. It won't write your code for you, but it'll save you from reinventing a wheel that already exists and is probably better maintained than whatever you'd build on a Tuesday afternoon.

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