Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xcode Constantly Phones Home

lapcatsoftware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 63 posts

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#31

Post by saagarjha »

gardaani wrote: post #7

Another annoying Xcode feature is that building a macOS app with Xcode command line tools (xcodebuild) sometimes complains that my iPhone is locked: "An error occurred whilst preparing device for development -- Failed to prepare the device for development. Domain: com.apple.dtdevicekit Code: 806 Recovery Suggestion: Please unlock and reconnect the device. The device is locked. Domain: com.apple.dt.MobileDeviceErrorDo…

For those that don't understand exactly how annoying this is, I once took the time to reverse engineer Xcode to figure out exactly where it was coming from and then inject code into it to make it shut up: https://github.com/saagarjha/dotfiles/blob/master/xcodebuild...

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#32

Post by gregoriol »

Another annoying "phone home" happens when you try to run an app on an iOS device with xcode: the iOS device needs internet to call Apple to verify the app, even though it has just been built and signed with an attached xcode. Eventhough it is just from time to time, this is highly annoying because you can't always work on developing/testing your app offline.

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#33

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Makes sense, and it is annoying, but there’s a lot of annoying stuff in Xcode. Looking at the console can get rather depressing. There’s a lot of “noise” in there, that is basically sound and fury, signifying nothing. I get tired of googling errors and warnings (I compile -wall, and take every warning seriously), only to realize they are meaningless “background noise,” due to the system trying to generate code for platforms other than the target, for instance. In those cases, Xcode usually won’t interrupt the build, just spit out an annoying warning.

Xcode is a huge, chimeric monster. I seriously doubt there’s anyone, anymore, that really knows what’s going on under the hood. It’s larger than many games, which says a lot.

That said, I regularly use it to produce fairly concise, performant applications, and I can bear the pain.

Here’s an example of me encountering an annoying warning[0], and being told “you’re holding it wrong.” I was basically chided for my style, which, I guess, is one PoV, but I feel didn’t actually answer the question, and, in my opinion, is pretty much irrelevant to the point.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79275128/is-there-a-way-...

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#35

Post by zombot »

saagarjha wrote: post #31
gardaani wrote: post #7

Another annoying Xcode feature is that building a macOS app with Xcode command line tools (xcodebuild) sometimes complains that my iPhone is locked: "An error occurred whilst preparing device for development -- Failed to prepare the device for development. Domain: com.apple.dtdevicekit Code: 806 Recovery Suggestion: Please unlock and reconnect the device. The device is locked. Domain: com.apple.dt.MobileDeviceErrorDo…

For those that don't understand exactly how annoying this is, I once took the time to reverse engineer Xcode to figure out exactly where it was coming from and then inject code into it to make it shut up: https://github.com/saagarjha/dotfiles/blob/master/xcodebuild...

Thanks for sharing. Do you build that into your app or should it run as a command line program on its own?

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#36

Post by Someone »

chubot wrote: post #22
amiantos wrote: post #21

if you are an apple ecosystem app developer, apple already has an awful lot of information about you. you've paid them $100 every year, you pay them at least a 15% cut of every sale. they know your personal address one way or another, and your tax information. you most likely use their IDE, their APIs / development kit, which either they provide or you are paying for as part of our $100 developer fee, depending on yo…

The blog post notes that it is poorly engineered and slow, which makes me glad I don't have to use Apple dev tools for anything

It may be poorly engineered and slow, but I don’t see this blog post say it’s poorly engineered, and only that it’s slow for this user.

For all we know from this article, that this step takes 50 seconds could be fairly specific for this user’s setup. If so, this would the kind of issue that can easily slip through QA.

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#37

Post by saagarjha »

zombot wrote: post #35
saagarjha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that don't understand exactly how annoying this is, I once took the time to reverse engineer Xcode to figure out exactly where it was coming from and then inject code into it to make it shut up: https://github.com/saagarjha/dotfiles/blob/master/xcodebuild...

Thanks for sharing. Do you build that into your app or should it run as a command line program on its own?

You need to disable SIP and then you can DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES (or equivalent) it into xcodebuild

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#38

Post by phist_mcgee »

0x0 wrote: post #30

I usually avoid logging in to xcode. I prefer to manually configure provisioning profiles and code signing certificates by hand in the developers.apple.com web interface anyways. You can use xcodebuild on the command line to get a signed ipa, and then you can use altool or application loader to upload the ipa to appstoreconnect. I don't trust xcode to not stomp all over my carefully configured provisioning profiles a…

I have never once trusted xcode to get provisioning profiles and certificates right.

It's always manual for me, at least that way xcode won't suddenly tell my app is not registered to a team and refuse to build.

I know it's not relevant to the discussion, but I want to voice publicly how much I loathe the build error system in XCode. How can they possibly think anyone will find their obtuse and downright impossible log system is helpful.

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#39

Post by mightysashiman »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #34

This is the tip of the iceberg. macOS itself is very chatty. There are a ton of Apple-signed system daemons constantly phoning home.

At some point I tried scripts aiming to disable daemons and firewall blocking MacOS stuff phoning home constantly (especially since I use no iCloud stuff) to make my system run a little leaner. But macOS is just such a complicated blackbox I just forgot about it... :(
Post reply on HN