textSelection broken in List on iOS 18

Happy iOS 18 release week! Exciting to see all of the new dark mode app icons going live; congrats to all of the indie devs out there who’ve gotten their apps approved in time for launch!

In testing iOS 18 on my own apps, I noticed that text selection no longer works in SwiftUI. This behavior is unfortunately reproducible on both the iOS 18 and iOS 18.1 tracks. Here’s the repro case:

import SwiftUI

struct ContentView: View {
  var body: some View {
    List {
      Text("Hello, world!")
        .textSelection(.enabled)
    }
  }
}

What this is supposed to look like when you tap and hold:

Unfortunately the tap and hold gesture appears to have broken in iOS 18. I filed FB15178192 to track this and will update this thread if/when the issue is resolved.

#

Workaround

In the meantime, I needed a workaround for this because the text selection behavior is an important use case in Sidecar to copy vehicle identification numbers (VINs).

Building a generic solution that works as a drop-in replacement for .textSelection(.enabled) is a bit tough, because we can’t easily get access to the modified view’s text contents. An alternative workaround is to provide a SelectableText view that allows us to pass the text string to the clipboard when needed.

import SwiftUI

struct SelectableText: View {
  private let string: String
  init(_ string: String) {
    self.string = string
  }

  init<F>(_ input: F.FormatInput, format: F) where F: FormatStyle, F.FormatInput: Equatable, F.FormatOutput == String {
    self.string = format.format(input)
  }

  var body: some View {
#if !os(watchOS)
    if #available(iOS 18, *) {
      Text(string)
        .contextMenu {
          Button(action: {
            UIPasteboard.general.string = string
          }) {
            Label("Copy", systemImage: "doc.on.doc")
          }
        }
    } else {
      Text(string)
        .textSelection(.enabled)
    }
#else
    Text(string)
#endif
  }
}

Our code can now go from this:

import SwiftUI

struct ContentView: View {
  var body: some View {
    List {
      Text("Hello, world!")
        .textSelection(.enabled)
    }
  }
}

to this:

import SwiftUI

struct ContentView: View {
  var body: some View {
    List {
      SelectableText("Hello, world!")
    }
  }
}

If/when iOS 18 fixes this behavior we can add additional checks to fall back to the system copy menu again.

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