Stop polluting your Swift codebase with endless do-catch blocks. Here's how to build a clean, scalable error pipeline that won't make you hate your life.

The Try-Catch Trap

We've all stared at that massive, 50-line do-catch block. You know the one. It looks like a staircase to nowhere. It's completely unreadable. It's a nightmare to test. And honestly, it's just lazy.

What's Broken in Your Codebase

Here's the thing. Most iOS devs handle errors like an afterthought. They slap a try? on a complex decoding operation and call it a day. Or worse, they wrap an entire function in a generic catch block and just print(error).

That works fine on a Tuesday afternoon when you're building a prototype. But in production? It breaks fast.

When you swallow errors, debugging becomes a massive pain. Your app fails silently. The UI hangs in an endless loading loop. Users get frustrated, leave a one-star review, and delete your app. You can't fix a bug if your architecture actively hides the problem from you.

What Actually Works

So, how do we fix it? You need to stop playing whack-a-mole and build a real pipeline.

1. Ditch the Generic Errors

Stop throwing standard NSError or basic Error types. Build specific, strongly-typed enums for your domains. Make them conform to LocalizedError. This tells you exactly what broke, where it broke, and what to show the user.

2. Embrace the Result Type

For asynchronous code, standard do-catch is clunky. Use Swift's Result type. It forces you to handle both success and failure states explicitly at the call site. You can't ignore it. The compiler won't let you. It makes your network layers infinitely cleaner.

3. Centralize Your UI Mapping

Don't write the same UIAlertController logic in twenty different screens. Build a centralized error router. Pass your custom domain errors to it. Let that single router map the error to a clean, user-friendly UI state. Keep your views dumb and your logic centralized.

War Stories from the Trenches

I saw this break horribly during a 2 a.m. deployment back in 2023. We pushed a massive update for a client's e-commerce app right before a big holiday sale.

Checkout started failing for about 15% of users. Why? Because a junior dev used try? on a new JSON payload parser. The backend added a new field, the local parser choked, and the try? just swallowed the type mismatch silently. The app just sat there on the checkout screen.

A client lost almost $40K in an hour.

We fixed it by rolling back to a previous build, ripping out the silent failures, and enforcing strict Result types across the entire checkout flow. It was a brutal, expensive lesson. Don't learn it the hard way.

The Final Verdict

Explicit error handling takes a few extra minutes up front. But it saves days of miserable debugging later. Pick a pattern, enforce it in your code reviews, and stop letting errors fall through the cracks.

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