A hidden trick to add a Launch Screen in SwiftUI

If you ever search for solutions of adding Launch Screen to an iOS app, there’ll be 2 main approaches: using storyboard (Apple’s recommendation), programmatically control UI based on active state. This post’s about the first one, because of its effectiveness.

From Apple developer document, first step is creating a new file - LaunchScreen.storyboard. After that, you have options of:

Option 1 - Add new item with key UILaunchScreen to Info tab

1. In the settings for your target, select the Info tab.
2. In the Custom iOS Target Properties section, expand the Launch Screen key.
3. Click the Add button (+), type in UILaunchScreen, and press Return to add the launch screen key to the property list. If the UILaunchScreen key is already present, you can skip this step.
4. Select the UILaunchScreen key, click the Add button (+), then enter UILaunchStoryboardName as key and LaunchScreen as value.

If the launch screen added successfully to your app, congratulation! However, this approach does not work for me.

Option 2 - Configure a launch screen storyboard

1. In the settings for your target, select the General tab and find the “App Icons and Launch Images” section.
2. From the Launch Screen File pop-up menu, choose the new launch screen file.

This option may work for you, but this does not work for me too.

My approach - Add Launch screen interface file base name to Info tab

1. In the settings for your target, select the Info tab.
2. In the Custom iOS Target Properties section, find the Launch screen interface file base name key.
3. If you don’t have this key in your project yet, just click (+) on any other key to add this.
4. Enter your launch screen file name, for me it’s LaunchScreen.

Tada 🎉 This time it works.

Not sure why Apple doesn’t mention this option in their document (maybe it’s not up to date?), but I haven’t found this trick anywhere on Internet. So I decide to share it, hope it will help someone.

Happy coding!