Why was UITextField's text property changed to an optional in Swift 2?

Question

According to the UIKit diff document, in ios9/Swift 2

var text: String! has become var text: String?

According to the documentation

Answer 1

A simple way around this problem is to create an extension to UITextField and use that instead of the .text property.

extension UITextField {
    var unwrappedText: String {
        return self.text ?? ""
     }
}

Now you can say textfield.unwrappedText without worrying about optionals. (Of course this is just for reading the value).