In this article I will share how I created an iOS Demo wallet with Swift, SwiftUI and the BitcoinDevKit (BDK) framework.

Marvellous May turned out to be an exciting month as I received a congratulatory mail for being accepted as a 2023 summer of bitcoin intern contributing to the “Create Swift iOS Demo wallet project”. As a junior iOS Developer I have always wanted to gain first class experience writing iOS apps and developing open source software, and the 2023 summer of bitcoin internship made my summer an interesting one to remember.

I got my summer underway with an onboarding meeting with my mentors, Steve Myers and Matthew Ramsden. I was delighted to speak with them about what we are working on this summer. The meeting was engaging as it lasted for two hours. We talked about everything bitcoin, iOS and the deliverables of the project for the summer. I was assigned my first task during the meeting and I was delighted to set up my dev environment.

Setting up development environment

Step 1 : Install rust via the rustup tool.

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curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Step 2 : Install bitcoind and bitcoin-cli locally.

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brew install bitcoin

Step 3 : Setup local regtest bitcoind wallet

After a week of the onboarding and setting up my dev environment, I was added to the project repo on GitHub by my mentor (Matthew Ramsden) and my second task was to create the project readme with the markdown language. It was an easy task so I did it in a jiffy and got my first pull request (PR) merged.

Create readme with markdown language

[BDKSwiftExampleWallet/README.md at main · reez/BDKSwiftExampleWalletBDK

Swift Example Wallet. Contribute to reez/BDKSwiftExampleWallet development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com](https://github.com/reez/BDKSwiftExampleWallet/blob/main/README.md?source=post_page —–c24689f30376—————————————)

The next task assigned to me was to create the demo wallet onboarding screen and it was interesting to work on. The bitcoin dev kit and walletUI frameworks were seamless to use so developing the screen was a breeze. What made the whole development process interesting was my mentor’s comments in my PR, lol he left so many comments in my PR which made me work harder and better. I was thrilled I was corrected when I made mistakes. Here is the link to the code on GitHub.

Creating the Onboarding screen

[BDKSwiftExampleWallet/BDKSwiftExampleWallet/View/OnboardingView.swift at

main ·…BDK Swift Example Wallet. Contribute to reez/BDKSwiftExampleWallet development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com](https://github.com/reez/BDKSwiftExampleWallet/blob/main/BDKSwiftExampleWallet/View/OnboardingView.swift?source=post_page —–c24689f30376—————————————)

OnboardingView in Dark mode

Creating the Wallet View

After finishing the onboarding screen of the wallet, I was assigned to build the wallet view of the project which was a very interesting view to build. It was my first time implementing a design done by a community of professionals. The wallet view was interesting to work on because it was technical, I love working on technical views as an iOS developer.

The Bitcoin design guide was so easy to follow so it sped up my dev process. Here is the link to the code on GitHub.

[BDKSwiftExampleWallet/BDKSwiftExampleWallet/View/WalletView.swift at main

·…BDK Swift Example Wallet. Contribute to reez/BDKSwiftExampleWallet development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com](https://github.com/reez/BDKSwiftExampleWallet/blob/main/BDKSwiftExampleWallet/View/WalletView.swift?source=post_page —–c24689f30376—————————————)

WalletView in Dark mode

“School of thought”

Something to keep in mind is that building a wallet like this has some caveats and developers must be ready to face them. I was faced with a lot of version control ( git ) problems for the wallet and it took me sometime to get them fixed. The 3 way merge may be frustrating at first but it is exciting to use once you wrap your head around it. Another problem I ran into was changing the repo from private to public ha ha ha, even git itself got lost at this point. My commits and PR couldn’t go to the upstream main so I had to fork the project from my mentor’s repository again.

Conclusion

Building an iOS App is great but building a bitcoin iOS app is greater. There are so many high quality features coming to the wallet and more complex screens still to be added. That will be all for this blog post.