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Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

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Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#301

Post by AJRF »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #295
AJRF wrote: post #283

(Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode). I recently started working for a startup, and they wanted an app. What I shipped was a react native app (so I don't need to go in to Xcode to build), that renders a full screen web browser that points to our website. I've sprinkled in bits of injected JS to capture our cookies and local/session storage -…

> (Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode). Since you’re pretty new to mobile dev, count yourself lucky with the amazing dev tools you have today. Nothing like doing a bit of J2ME, Symbian S60 or BlackBerry development to learn to appreciate how far we’ve come.

Ha! Curious - as an old timer, how you enjoying this new vibe coding world?

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#302

Post by Cthulhu_ »

AJRF wrote: post #290
solids wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to hear if you had any trouble passing review.

Zero so far - we've never had a single ding in 30+ submissions. Will update here if we do.

I really think the standards for review have lowered, or, they're more spot check or based on whoever reviews them these days, with different layers of seniority in reviewers.

For example, we had an app that was fine for years, but one day it was rejected because it didn't have an offline-available privacy policy readable without logging in (or something to that effect). Another time it was suddenly rejected because we released an update to two whitelabel apps (mostly same app, different brands) simultaneously; we had to find higher-ups to vouch that they were in fact different brands and that it was OK and not some kind of copycat.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#303

Post by Cthulhu_ »

NL807 wrote: post #287
mads_quist wrote: post #265

What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though. Native app development is an evil necessity.

>Native app development is an evil necessity. I wish people did more native app development.

Same, I did try to sell native app development to my current project, but some higher up had already decided on React Native at the time.

And I get it, it feels like native app development is a more expensive specialism, and this particular use case is mostly the customer portal but in an app. But I retain the strong opinion that if you as a company are serious about app development, if you want a good app, you need native apps and native app developers.

Especially if you want to be present outside of the confines of your app - widgets, lock screen activities, smart watches, etc all require proper native components, because they come with very tight memory constraints and just loading in React Native and its JS stuff costs you 80% of available memory budget.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#304

Post by Cthulhu_ »

urbandw311er wrote: post #291
rjzzleep wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did xcode turn into this? It wasn't too bad early on IMHO

Used XCode in anger from 2011-2016 to develop an iOS app with several million users and found it to be just as awful and temperamental as others here describe.

For the most part it was great (IMO), and has some features I still miss in all other editors, like the automatic side-by-side toggling, using mouse gestures (on Apple's mouse) to go back / forward in history just like Safari, etc.

The most friction came from merging (e.g. when files were changed or project config was changed), due to xcode's insistence on having a project file listing all files etc. The other friction was in the annual update cycle of both xcode and the apps we built.

But the last time I tried xcode it was pretty bad; on paper the new UI coding approach is great, but in practice the live preview was so tempramental and crashed so often it was barely usable.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#306

Post by neutronicus »

asimovDev wrote: post #248
neutronicus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I develop C++ on XCode and Visual Studio. I've recently started using XCode more because the performance on my Windows tower has become abominable in the past couple years and the M1 laptop is still snappy. XCode is just terrible compared to Visual Studio. As you said, there are weird beachballs all the time both while stepping and while waiting for the application to stop at a breakpoint (in cases where it happ…

Have you tried Clion for C++? I am not an experienced C dev by any means, but I am satisfied with their debugging for all the projects I worked on in that IDE. It has a free community license so no need to pay

I have not!

Ultimately, my complaints only really apply to coding for work. For personal projects I find emacs / LSP / dap more than sufficient.

But to be honest this is still something I should maybe bring up with our tools team. If it works well with .xcodeproj files it might be a good fit for our team.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#308

Post by seba_dos1 »

mads_quist wrote: post #265

What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though. Native app development is an evil necessity.

Fortunately native mobile app development with tools like Meson, Ninja or debhelper is a breeze.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#309

Post by spacedcowboy »

9dev wrote: post #294
spacedcowboy wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give specific examples ? About the only thing I use the terminal for in Xcode is "git" - and even then these days I tend to use Fork.app for that. Debugging is integrated, profiling is integrated, script-running as part of the build is integrated. Application output is integrated. What do you actually use it for ? Genuine question. I guess the AI tools might be something - I don't know about that, I don't use…

I work a lot with frameworks or languages that bring their own script runner or CLI companion to execute various tasks during development; quality checks or formatters, auxiliary tools like the Stripe webhook proxy, or interactive ones like a psql session into the database or a docker compose log stream; some of them longer-running, others single-shot executables. Depending on what I'm doing, I need these processes e…

Good answer. I guess we work in slightly different realms :)

I've set up tasks to run at build-time in Xcode - the 'Build Phases' tab can add tasks to be run automatically, which are just shell-scripts and Xcode sets up just about every variable under the sun for you in the environment, so you can navigate to the right directory, add the current-target as part of a name etc. They're saved as part of the project so everyone gets them.

But that doesn't cope with the interactive side of what you're talking about. In truth, I've always just done that from the command line 'pqsl -d ' (or 'sqlite3 database') has always been sufficient - though if your interactive session shares the database context that the application is also using (so you're not waiting for a flush to get updates) that would be interesting.

Quality checking I tend to integrate with git rather than the IDE, setting up a hook on pre-commit to run unit tests and so on. In a previous life different teams used different IDEs, but we always wanted the tests to run :)

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#310

Post by Eric_WVGG »

saagarjha wrote: post #165
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like you, I think that Xcode maybe gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it's also endlessly frustrating. First, the performance is just bad . The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day. The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me…

Nit: symbol files are copied from a device.

Thanks for the correction.

Still have no idea what it actually means, or why it takes so crazy long.

If they have to update symbols upon every OS version bump, are they cleaning out the old ones? It's so frustratingly opaque.

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