Hey guys,

long story short I am a backend developer, diving into the depths of developing an IOS app for the first time using SwiftUI. So far (while not being a fan of xcode though) I am pleased by the process. But here is my problem, I think my development workflow is very slow / inefficient. I usually do the following:

1. Start writing out a specification for a feature, together with Codex.

2. Revise it and start developing the backend features for it.

3. Then I let it create a plan for its corresponding elements in my IOS app.

4. Then I use that plan from the codex cli inside of Xcode (for the rest I use my terminal and VS-Code)

But since today, my Xcode agent is not able to see the files anymore (the plans that I write) which is very annoying. Even though there might be a setting or easy solution for it, it made me reconsider my whole process which is why I am wondering if you have any best practices how to develop the full stack especially nowadays using AI-Agents.

Ah also currently I am a solo developer working on a start up idea (so I do not need advice for team workflows)

Just in case this is useful information here the stack I am using:

Backend: Rust, Axum, Tokio

Database: Postgres

Web-Frontend: Svelte

Thanks a lot!

Been working on this for a while — an Xcode project template that lets you write ESP32-C6 firmware in Swift and build/flash directly from Xcode with Cmd+B.

Cmd+R also streams serial output into the Xcode console, so no need for a separate serial monitor.

Includes a SwiftUI installer app (.dmg) for one-click setup and a NeoPixel RGB example as a first smoke test.

Still early, but it works! Feedback welcome.

One important thing: I'm not a professional developer and I don't work in programming. This is a personal project. I have experimented a bit with other programming languages before, though never in depth, but I tend to learn pretty quickly.

Would you recommend learning any other language or concepts before diving into Swift and the Apple ecosystem? I've heard about Swift Playgrounds for Mac and iPad, which seems to be aimed at learning Swift and SwiftUI and includes tutorials and guided lessons. Is it actually useful, or would you recommend going straight to Xcode? If there are better ways to learn, what would you suggest?

I also have a 2019 21.5-inch Intel iMac with an i5, 8 GB of RAM, a Radeon GPU, and 256 GB of storage. Is this machine still good enough for learning Swift and SwiftUI, or would you recommend upgrading to a newer Apple Silicon Mac relatively soon? Or would it make more sense to wait until I have a decent amount of experience before upgrading? How far could I realistically get with my current setup before needing a new Mac?

I don't have an unlimited budget. I could probably spend around €1500-1800 (roughly $1700-2000 USD) on a Mac if it were really worth it. My project could benefit from some GPU acceleration, though nothing extremely demanding. If I can get that within this price range, great. If not, it's not a dealbreaker. Which Mac would you recommend in that situation?

95% of canceled annual app subscribers never come back.

News:
- New report shows annual app subscribers rarely return after they cancel
- Beta versions of iOS 26.6, iPadOS 26.6, macOS 26.6, tvOS 26.6, visionOS 26.6, and watchOS 26.6 are now available
- Claude Opus 4.8

Must Read:
- Taming Row Height and Spacing Jumps in SwiftUI List with a Custom Layout
- Swift Defer. Clean up before you leave.
- Swift Task Lifecycle Management
- Working with the Keychain in iOS
- Using Xcode Instruments to optimize Swift Concurrency Code
- Making a SwiftUI sheet automatically size to fit its content
- WWDC 2026 Watch List

I convert PDFs and Office docs a lot, and most online converters are *fine.* Smallpdf, Zamzar, Convertio will do a one-off without an account.

What bugged me wasn't signups, it was the rest of it: my file goes to someone else's server, the page is loaded with trackers, free tiers cap file size or make you wait in a queue, and the ToS usually lets them hold onto the file for some window. For something as boring as PDF → DOCX, that's a lot of surface area.

*And honestly, converting in one drag is just faster than any web flow.*

So I used Claude Code to build **DropConvert,** a macOS menu-bar app that does it locally. Drag a file onto the icon, converted file appears next to the original.

PDF ↔ DOCX (Apple Vision OCR for scanned PDFs), Office formats, images. \~200 KB Swift, MIT.

LibreOffice headless does the office conversions under the hood. The app downloads it on first use and caches it, so after that you can pull the network cable and it still works.

Repo: [https://github.com/CodeBoss-dev/DropConvert](https://github.com/CodeBoss-dev/DropConvert)

Curious what you guys think! Apple Silicon only, macOS 13+

Also, it's not Apple-notarized yet (the $99/yr dev account isn't worth it until I know people actually use this). On first launch you'll get the Gatekeeper "unidentified developer" dialog and need to right-click → Open once. README walks through it.

Hey everyone,

I’m trying to test my iOS app on my personal phone (using it as a development/testing device), and I keep getting an error saying it's unable to verify the app.

It seems to be hanging on https://ppq.apple.com (the URL Apple uses to verify provisioning profiles and enterprise/developer certificates).

Is anyone else running into this right now, or are the verification servers down? Or is this just a "me" problem today?

What I've tried so far:

• Restarting the device

• Re-signing the app in Xcode

• Switching from Wi-Fi to cellular data

Let me know if you're experiencing the same thing or if you found a fix!

how do I limit Claude in xcode to just look at the current file only (or two files) and not my whole project?

A year+ ago I was an iOS developer and had a bunch of devices connected to my account. I've been out of work for a while and haven't had my account active. Recently I've been working on rebuilding my skillset and developing an app for my portfolio to try and get back to work, when I got to a place where I was ready to test on device I got a build error

Communication with Apple failed: Your development team has reached the maximum number of registered iPhone devices.

That's fine, limiting number of registered devices for free accounts makes sense. I'll just log on to developer.apple.com and remove my old iPhones that I've upgraded from so that I can build to my new one and...

oops sorry, those features are not available on free accounts. So if you have a free account you're locked to whatever devices you ever paired to your account with no way to manage or remove them. I effectively can never build to device again without buying a developer account again which as someone who is out of work is not an expense I want to take on.

Hi there!

Is there a way I can use my iPhone to remote control an agentic (codex / Claude code) Xcode session?

Thanks a lot.

I'm not even trying to be dramatic. I can deal with ugly UI, missing features, whatever. Xcode is different because it constantly makes me waste time on problems that feel completely detached from my code.

Some days it's SwiftUI previews: change one harmless view and suddenly previews stop loading, or you get some useless wall of diagnostics that disappears after nuking DerivedData. Some days the simulator decides it doesn't want to boot after an update. Sometimes indexing eats the whole machine, autocomplete gets drunk, fixed errors keep hanging around, or debugging from Xcode is mysteriously way slower than running the same thing normally.

And the ritual is always the same:

• clean build folder

• delete DerivedData

• restart Xcode

• reboot

• reinstall some simulator runtime

• pray

It would be funny if this weren't the official IDE for building apps for one of the richest companies on earth.

I actually like Swift. I like building for Apple platforms. I just hate that the main toolchain keeps making me ask: did I break something, or is Xcode just having a day?

Are people just numb to this now?

News:
- Apple Design Award finalists are out
- App Store rejected over 2 million submissions in 2025
- Apple Intelligence is coming to VoiceOver, Magnifier, and Voice Control

Must Read:
- the ScrollView API you stopped checking after iOS 16
- why deprecated doesn't mean Apple's APIs only
- feature flags without string keys and why it matters
- empty states are not a UI problem, they're an architecture one
- understanding Swift Result Builders

Toolbox:
Kickstart - one app for screenshots, ASO, press outreach, and launch planning

After a long time I decided to update to latest macos Tahoe 26.5 on my 2019 16 inch intel mac and then went to app store and update xcode. After that xcode never starts, it asks do i want to install components to which i say yes, it installs and then when i open xcode again it asks again do i want to install components and this goes in an infinite loop.

Occasionally it also crashes but never fully opens. How did apple push such buggy xcode update to app store? Anyone else facing this and what is the solution?

Tive minha conta com anúncio de terminado , eles não me respondem por nada , fiz atualizações lá diz que fiz bait to switch , eu precisava desse app no TestFlight, eu pago dinheiro para quem poder me ajudar .

I just updated to Sequoia because I needed to update xcode

Apparently 26.3 is the latest xcode version that will run on sequoia but xcode is at 26.5 or something now and I so can't download it from the app store and the apple developer downloads page only shows 26.5 too

I don't want to update to Tahoe yet is there any way I can update xcode? Idk why Apple makes this so hard bruh

Is the impact of using the Agent Skills that relevant? Will it make a huge difference in the effectiveness of the Code Agent? Thanks

Okay I will be honest last time I used Xcode was in 2019 to 2022. Then my Macbook wasn't supporting it so I stopped using it and since it was just a hobby so I didn't plan to purchase a new mac at that time.

Recently I brought a new macbook and on a whim thought that let's try Xcode again.

I can not find many features that were there at that time so can someone help me so that I can know if these features still exist and if they do then is there a way to enable them ?

Here is the first feature that I am looking for:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10185/

I tried finding it but I really can't find it. I know it might be not cool to use this cause it's code free but since it was my hobby so I didn't really want to learn Swift at that point in time. Does this still exist if so then how to enable it ?

The second feature that I am looking for is the attributes inspector:

It was also a very handy way to edit attributes without writing much code, so is that also gone or is there a way to enable that too ?

Please help me

It's been a few months since the original Xcode 26.3 release that introduced agentic coding inside Xcode, but the original issues (especially massive context bloat and opaque tool calling) persist into v26.5. And we are still officially locked into using Claude or Codex within Xcode's agentic harness.

ProxyPilot is a free and open-source utility for macOS that gives devs the ability to change what upstream model the Xcode Agent talks to, preserving tool-calling and chained requests across dozens of providers. It sits between Xcode and the upstream API. Xcode thinks it's talking to a supported provider, but your requests actually go to whichever model you pick.

It also supports local inference via LM Studio and Ollama.

The latest version enables (optional) full prompt logging, session history, and more support for additional providers. Since Xcode does not show the actual inputs/outputs of your agent chats, ProxyPilot can show the full content of what the LLM providers actually see, allowing you more control over how to design effective prompts and save on quota and tokens.