TripKit iOS 5.0: A modern iOS SDK for trip planning

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2–3 minutos

TripKit iOS 5.0 is here — a major release that modernises our Open Source trip planning SDK with powerful new features and future-proof architecture. Built on a Swift-only codebase, with full Swift Package Manager (SPM) support and a new Linux compatible API core, this version marks the culmination of years of development alongside our TripGo app. The result is our most stable and versatile SDK to date for developers building apps requiring a journey planning SDK or mobility SDK.

Swift Package Manager (SPM) Compatibility

We’ve added full Swift Package Manager support, making TripKit easier than ever to integrate into your projects. Whether you’re using Xcode’s built-in package manager or managing dependencies programmatically, TripKit now fits naturally into modern iOS development workflows. This includes the TripKitUI components, allowing you to drop them directly into your app when building with a trip planning SDK.

With CocoaPods being deprecated and Carthage falling out of favour, SPM is now the preferred dependency manager for Swift projects. TripKit’s SPM support ensures developers can integrate the SDK with minimal setup and maximum reliability – important for anyone working with a routing SDK or public transport SDK.

Cross-Platform API Core

While iOS remains the primary platform (as the name suggests), we’ve expanded cross-platform capabilities with the introduction of TripKitAPI — a new core component fully compatible with Linux.

This opens up opportunities for server-side Swift applications, enabling developers to use TripKit’s powerful routing capabilities across different platforms while maintaining consistency in their transportation logic. For users of the TripKit journey planning SDK this change is mostly transparent, as the existing TripKit framework now depends on TripKitAPI for its core functionality.

Internally, we use this to run automated routing tests on Linux servers, ensuring our trip planning logic remains consistent and reliable across different environments, regions, and use cases.

Feature Enhancements

The changes in TripKit iOS 5.0 are extensive, but here are some highlights:

  • New TKUIPathChartView: Built on Apple’s Swift Charts framework for interactive trip visualisations
  • Improved accessibility: Enhanced VoiceOver support and more descriptive labels
  • Vehicle notifications: Support for approach notifications and real-time vehicle tracking
  • Smarter autocomplete: Enhanced location search with improved result merging
  • Points of interest filtering: More control over search result types
  • Real-time updates: Stronger handling of live transport data

Developer Experience Improvements

  • Async/await support: Modern concurrency patterns for better performance and cleaner code
  • MainActor annotations: Proper threading annotations for UI-related components
  • DocC documentation: Comprehensive, interactive documentation replacing our previous documentation system

This release also includes stability improvements and optimisations:

  • Multi-threading robustness enhancements
  • CoreData async operation fixes
  • Improved error handling and networking resilience
  • Memory management optimisations
  • Enhanced location services integration

Platform Requirements

TripKit now requires iOS 15 as the minimum deployment target — maintaining support for a wide range of devices while adopting the latest iOS features.

Migration Guide

For developers upgrading from TripKit 4.x:

  1. Update your minimum deployment target to iOS 15
  2. Review deprecations and compile errors: The transition away from Objective-C may introduce some breaking changes
  3. Adopt async/await patterns where available for better performance
  4. Update SPM dependencies if migrating from CocoaPods or Carthage

Refer to our documentation or join our Slack community for support.

What’s Next

Later this month we’ll be releasing a refreshed UI, designed with iOS 26 in mind.

Resources

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