After a few weeks of teasing the CloudKit synchronization tools coming to our SwiftData alternative, and demoing the tools during last week’s live stream, we are finally ready to release a private alpha. This alpha period will help us gather critical feedback so that we can release a public beta in the coming weeks, and then eventually the final release of the tools.

Here is everything you need to know about the private alpha:

Our popular SharingGRDB library provides a viable alternative to SwiftData that gives you direct access to SQLite and all of its wonderful powers. We have multiple demos and case studies built with the library, including a slimmed down version of Apple’s Reminders app that demonstrates advanced querying, many-to-many join tables, search, and more.

This library forms the foundation of what we like to call “modern persistence”, but that may be a misnomer because the library currently does not have a solution for synchronizing data across multiple devices. That is, until now!

We are happy to say that we have made a lot of progress towards bringing seamless CloudKit integration to apps using SQLite, with the following feature set:

• Most apps using SharingGRDB will be able to enable CloudKit syncing in their app with just a few lines of code. You may need to make a few tweaks to your schema to support CloudKit, but we will provide documentation and tools to aid in that migration.

• Synchronization happens seamlessly behind the scenes with no additional work on your part. You can continue reading from and writing to your database like normal, and all changes will automatically be synchronized to all of your user’s devices.

• Foreign keys are supported, including one-to-many and many-to-many associations, and even ON DELETE and ON UPDATE cascading works. However, foreign key constraints are not supported (i.e. requiring that a parent record to exist for a child to point to it) because CloudKit may deliver records in multiple, disconnected batches.

• Large binary assets are supported (images, movies, audio files, etc.) and are automatically turned into CKAssets and uploaded to CloudKit behind the scenes.

• Your users can share their records with other iCloud users, all with just a few lines of code. The library handles synchronizing changes between multiple users and all of their devices.

• All of the underlying CloudKit metadata (i.e. CKRecords, CKShares, etc.) are all publicly available and queryable from SQLite. This means you can easily query for records in your database that are currently being shared with other iCloud users, and easily pull extra data from CloudKit such as participants and permissions for a shared record.

It may seem too good to be true, but our library accomplishes all of this, and more.

Currently we are opening the alpha only to Point-Free subscribers. This will give us a smaller audience to get feedback from an audience that is already familiar with our work. If you are interested in participating in the alpha preview, contact us from the email that is associated with your Point-Free account, and provide your GitHub username.

We do not recommend using the alpha version of these tools in the production version of an existing app or an app you plan on releasing soon. The APIs will most likely change before the final version, and there may be bugs that cause bad data to be written to your iCloud containers.

The most ideal way to test the alpha preview would be to build a greenfield toy app with CloudKit synchronization to get a feel for how the tools work. Here are some ideas:

• A voice memos app that synchronizes the audio file across devices. Bonus points for using the new SpeechAnalyzer API in iOS 26 for transcribing the audio and using Foundation Models to summarize the memo.

• A flashcards app that allows a user to create decks of flashcards, with each deck containing multiple cards, and the ability to share decks with other users. Bonus points for allowing users to associate images, audio clips and videos to the flashcards.

• A podcast app that synchronizes progress of episodes across devices. You can also add a feature that allows a user to organize a playlist of their favorite episodes and share it with other users.

That’s just a few fun ideas, but I’m sure you can come up with more!

If you really, really want to try out these tools in your app during the alpha period, we recommend doing so in a temporary CloudKit container that you can delete at a later date. And no matter what, do not ship an app to the App Store using the alpha preview of our library.

Feedback is much appreciated during the alpha preview, and it would be best to open a new topic on the SharingGRDB repo for long form discussion, or for chat-like discussion you can ask questions in the #sharing-grdb channel of our Slack.

This is just the beginning for these tools. Once we gather a bit of feedback we will prepare a beta preview for a broader audience, and then officially release the tools in the coming weeks. We are excited to see what everyone makes with SharingGRDB!