TheTrades

A SwiftUI app for browsing movies, TV shows, and the people who make them, built on TMDB. Universal for iPhone and iPad.

Features

• Discover — Trending This Week, Popular Movies, and Popular TV carousels, fetched concurrently, plus your recently viewed titles and recent searches.
• Search — debounced multi-search across movies, TV, and people, with scope filtering and infinite scroll.
• Detail views — movies, TV shows, seasons, episodes, and people, with backdrops, genres, cast, and trailers.
• Age at release — every cast member's age when the title came out, shown inline on the cast row. This is the feature the app exists for.
• Spoiler mode — blurs episode titles, stills, and overviews until you tap. On by default.
• Watchlist — save anything, browse it as a list or a poster grid.
• Adaptive layout — a tab bar in compact width, a sidebar split view in regular, with per-tab navigation history preserved across the switch.

No account, no tracking, no analytics. Saved data lives in UserDefaults on device; the bundled privacy manifest declares no data collection.

Requirements

• Xcode 16 or later (Swift 6)
• iOS 17.0+
• XcodeGen

Getting started

TheTrades.xcodeproj is generated from project.yml and is not checked in, so generate it after cloning:

brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/jeffmueller/TheTrades.git
cd TheTrades
xcodegen generate
open TheTrades.xcodeproj

That's the whole setup. The app builds and runs in the simulator, and the test suite passes, with no TMDB token and no Apple Developer account.

Adding a TMDB token

Without a token the app builds and launches but shows an error card instead of data. To see real content:

1. Create a free account at themoviedb.org and open Settings → API.

2. Copy the API Read Access Token — the long v4 token, not the short v3 API key.

3. Create your local config and paste it in:

   cp Config/Local.example.xcconfig Config/Local.xcconfig

   TMDB_BEARER_TOKEN = eyJhbGciOi...
   

Config/Local.xcconfig is gitignored. The token is copied into the app's Info.plist at build time and read back by TMDBConfiguration, which also honours a TMDB_BEARER_TOKEN environment variable if you'd rather set one on the scheme.

Building for a device

Simulator builds need no signing. For a device, add your own values to Config/Local.xcconfig:

TT_BUNDLE_ID_PREFIX = com.yourdomain
DEVELOPMENT_TEAM = ABCDE12345

Testing

xcodebuild -project TheTrades.xcodeproj -scheme TheTrades \
  -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 16' test

29 tests in 5 suites, written with Swift Testing. They never touch the network: MediaFetching is the seam, and TestSupport injects a stub client and an isolated UserDefaults suite.

Architecture

UI	SwiftUI, @Observable state, NavigationStack with typed destinations
Concurrency	Swift 6 with SWIFT_STRICT_CONCURRENCY: complete; TMDBClient is an actor
Networking	URLSession + Codable, no networking dependency
Images	Nuke / NukeUI
Persistence	UserDefaults
Project	XcodeGen; project.yml is the source of truth

Roughly 3,100 lines of app code across Views, Models, Services, and Navigation.

TheTrades/
├── App/            Entry point, AppState, TMDB configuration
├── Models/         Codable types for movies, shows, people, library items
├── Navigation/     Typed destinations and per-tab navigation stacks
├── Services/       TMDBClient, URL builders, persistence, age calculation
└── Views/          Discover, Search, detail screens, Watchlist, Settings

Dependency versions are pinned in Package.resolved at the repo root — an unusual location, but its normal home is inside the generated .xcodeproj, which isn't tracked. xcodegen generate is followed by a copy into place in CI and in the release script.

Releasing

scripts/testflight.sh archives and uploads to TestFlight in one command, defaulting the build number to the commit count. It reads App Store Connect API credentials from a gitignored scripts/release.env; see release.env.example.

License

MIT.

This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.