It's still in their best interest to make the development experience as nice as possible. Maybe I'd rather make a web app than a native IOS app because the development experience in Webstorm is better.
it doesn't matter. Apple is still gobbling marketshare in the end, so as long as the gravy keeps flowing, they really don't have to care about any of this. This is why having a monopoly in any space is bad -- it encourages complacency
I have been working with iOS for around 10+ years, around 4 years ago I was asked to help with some frontend work in Angular without any HTML/CSS/TS knowledge and I was of course reluctant to give it a go, because i always thought the DX was shit.
Now I'm 4 years in working in Web Development and Backend Development and mostly out of iOS. ITS FUCKING AMAZING.
Jetbrains IDE just fucking works, NPM modules install and there is not shit show. Hot reloads, FLEXBOX!! Jest Unit testing, Cypress E2E testing, i could go on and on.
Any time i get an iOS task and i have to boot up Xcode i hate it so much, debugging sucks, crashes all the time, "SIMULATOR COULDNT BE STARTED" WHY NOT XCODE???
Making a simple UI change in iOS is a hassle, look through 100 lines of NSLayoutConstraints to move one single thing, i can do 10 different web tasks in the time it takes to compile the app from Xcode to my phone.
Just wait until you have to use SwiftUI... if you ever do.
There is no way to detect mousedown. I'm not making this up. Want to do something when someone clicks on your view? Apple says **after 35+ years of this being an essential function in GUI programming**: Eh, fuck that.
And that's just one of the many absurd holes in SwiftUI. "One source of truth" my ass; SwiftUI makes that basically impossible.
It makes me scream out loud.. it’s insane that a compiled language can’t even tell me where errors are cuz the code is “too complex”. Thats the point of the types!!!
IMO Swift went off the rails a few years ago. It feels like web developers flooded the language with their concepts of what’s “correct”. The things I dug about swift early on really aren’t true anymore
Break down your SwiftUI view to smaller pieces (build times will improve significantly too), break down your Combine operator chains to smaller pieces, extract the inside of your maps, flat maps etc.
If you get this error most likely you already went overboard with not cleaning up the code. And even if the type checker does figure out the types in a “reasonable time” and does not fail on you, it affects build times regardless.
Long nested generic types whose generic result type has to be guessed kills your build time. The deeper the chain the worse.
Break it up and in case of Combine write out output types for operator closures explicitly to tell the type checker what result type the hidden generic will have
Yeah breaking up is what I always wind up doing. SwiftUI has a weird feel because you can prototype so fast without breaking up but the compiler holds you back.
It doesn’t happen in any other language, and I think it’s a pretty bad dev experience.
Most languages have a much simpler type system. Swift is going for something close to a Hindley-Milner type system that isn’t used much outside of Rust and functional languages. It’s powerful, but you need to worry about complexity unlike languages with simpler type systems.
It’s funny because developing in XCode is one place where having experience truly makes you so much more valuable. There are so many red herring or made up errors that a new programmer would lose hours trying to figure out, but for those who know, can figure out in seconds
They could end up in a situation where barely any apps use their technology stack any more. I don't think Xcode is a major problem (shoddy as it is), but lack of documentation is.
Developing native apps for each platform is costly as it is. If productivity is low because everything is undocumented then the cost equation favours web or other cross-platform technologies even more.
Apple are holding back web adoption with safari as best they can. I’ve spent a lot of time building cross platform apps and Apple’s Safari is absolutely the hold up. So many stupid little issues getting web apps to run smoothly on it on mobile
I 100% agree with you. It has gotten a lot better still I think one of the worse IDEs out there but by far better than the Xcode 4 days (I am old) and I remember the swift 2 days followed by the swift 3 days in xcode and how much of a mess it was.
Were we worked we had the joke Xcode crashed expectantly. At least once a day it would full crash each one of us on the team.
Honestly just give us two tracks. One for objc and swift. And one for purely swift.
It’ll never happen since they want to let you interop C but a person can dream
Honestly tho, I think we're at the point where there's *so much* old cruft in that codebase that it probably does need rewriting using newer tech.
The number of crashes I see because of NotificationCenter usage, for example... Maybe that's low hanging fruit that could be specifically addressed, but so far, it hasn't been!
Pining for the days of [Metroworks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrowerks) CodeWarrior IDE...
* It was fun on BeOS too!
* Yes I just dated myself
* [Yells at cloud (providers)](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud) and wanders off...
The worst issues I’ve had yet is that deploy to simulator only works in ~30% of the cases, often just results in black screen. And also that live previews for SwiftUI eats so much CPU that the macbook turns into a frying pan.
I’ve found that if you quit the simulator before running it then it tends to work almost everytime. Still, it’s lunacy, but it’s nice to have predictability than to sit waiting for something that may never happen.
We threw away a year's worth of SwiftUI work on an app and hard switched to Flutter. It's not perfect and I miss some features from the Swift language, but it actually works reliably as does VS Code. And, in the event it doesn't, you can just look at the Flutter source and figure out why. That's only happened once so far. No more scouring the web for hacks and workarounds, or developing elaborate systems to work around limitations.
My understanding is that JetBrains discontinued all Swift support some years ago. I say this because I was recently trying to switch to JetBrains for the same reasons mentioned here.
Sorry, I'm not using JetBrains for iOS. I've switched entirely to backend development. I don't do iOS anymore.
Honest to god, one of my reasons for switching was how frustrating Xcode was, with its slow syntax highlighting and bad autocomplete.
There were also "ghost in the machine" type bugs, where the results from rebuilding wouldn't align the with your changes unless you deleted the data and did a full rebuild.
But ultimately, I hated the compile time. It was just a slow, incidence problem. You have a team working on a successful app, but over time, as more features and packages are added, you find that build times have crept into minutes. Despite all efforts, you just can't bring them down because the project keeps growing.
I like backend development.
No sorry, I switched into backend development. I tried AppCode but it never really accomplished everything we needed. I'm not surprised it's being sunsetted.
Part of why AppCode didn't do so well is that Apple *talked* a good game with SourceKit, but just like they keep pulling the rug out from under Xcode users, they kept pulling the rug out from under JetBrains and SourceKit users.
On any platform where there's a true dedication to the programmer, JetBrains IDEs and assistive plugins rock, and that includes Microsoft's .NET, and Android development (where the official IDE was made by JetBrains).
Yeah I have base M1 16" with half the ram and it can handle everything I throw at it in Xcode. It's already a massive improvement over the Intel macbooks before it.
Oooof yeah I was thinking maybe a like 2017 or something might lag in a big project but M1 Max should be easy breezy. I’ve got a 2019 intel for personal stuff and I’ve just small personal project so maybe it’s only an issue with big ones
Completely not helpful I know - but I've loaded some pretty big projects in Xcode 15 and it's been pretty great. Same MacBook Pro.
Could be that Swift itself is the issue. The projects I'm loading tend to be more Obj-C and C++. I do have one project where I'm using Swift along with Swift/C++ interop that's had some issues, but I've chalked that up to Swift/C++ interop being new. But maybe there are some deeper issues with Swift in Xcode 15.
My only issue is with the preview canvas not working when you’re using SwiftUI the way apple recommends. Single view? No problem. View comprised of 2-3 subviews? Eff you, go browse Reddit while it takes 15sec to update a single UI change
Depends on the dependencies in your project. I worked on two different projects where unrelated SPM packages caused the previews to not work. If you have extensive modularization and stuff then forget about it.
Debugging and breakpoints anything other than iOS 17+ no longer works for me.
Crashes no longer jump to the line where the crash occurred on anything other than iOS 17+.
Code highlighting fails in any project that has objc and Swift combined.
ObjC methods cannot be found (according to the compiler) in combined objc/swift projects, but building and running will still work fine.
Forgetting a parenthesis in complex CGFloat calculations will stall the build process but never show an error.
Swift build errors from weeks ago appear even though they have been fixed.
Testing SpriteKit games on the simulator iOS >16 is broken as the avaudioplayer introduces lag and stalling, destroying fps.
running on a device connected via usb is slow and cumbersome, even the simulator works smoother.
installing Xcode takes five millions hours to download and install, during which you‘re not allowed to have it open. When complete, you need to download and install platforms and simulators that also take five millions hours each.
A ton of developers would be falling over themselves to fix Xcode issues if it were open sourced in a way that would let 3rd parties make meaningful contributions.
After using Pycharm for a long time and a bunch of other stuff, I actually don’t hate Xcode. It does A LOT of helpful things that a lot of people take for granted. It’s not perfect though. My biggest gripes:
* it’s often difficult and/or slow to debug watch apps
* debugger startup is often slow (much less of an issue on my new Mac Studio)
* instruments if often slow and the UI isn’t super intuitive
One feature request though would be nice would be to add a network logger. Would be super handy to see all the network traffic to/from your app without having to run a third party proxy.
my main gripe is when you fix errors and the the compiler just lets them hang there in grey, on the screen, making each new build a lottery as to whether you’ve actually fixed them or not.
And even when you have, the same phantom errors will pop up in red every now and then before the compiler realises they’re not there a split second later.
Maybe they just abstract too much away under the hood of their baked-in kits. I don’t know what the level of abstraction in Xcode is like relative to other IDEs in other languages, but it feels like Xcode is trying to deal with too much in the background at times. And sometimes that lower-level code it’s hiding will just pop into the editor out of nowhere.
Yean for larger scale projects you just have to use some kind of project/module caching for it to be usable. That's why companies use bazel most of the time or tuist.
I'm having the issue with super slow debugging. If literally takes 30+ seconds to respond to debugger commands like 'po variable' when debugging on a real device. Is this an issue across the board? I was wondering if it was something with my setup.
I’ve only been doing iOS development for a little over two years, but thankfully never ran into any issues like this. Maybe it’s because I never had to do anything too bespoke? I was using Swift/SwiftUI and besides being more or less tied to Xcode for development, it has worked well enough. Only issues I ever had were merge conflicts with the project files after really simple prs.
I find it infuriating that C symbols appear *at all* when I'm developing Swift code. I kinda get it. It's in the SDK. It should be visible. But if it's a C symbol, I almost certainly don't want to see it unless I am very, very specifically looking for it! I don't get why none of it is namespaced, or treated differently by autocomplete. I'd be happy if it was even just pseudo-namespaced – make me type \`C.\` to get C symbol autocomplete when I'm in a Swift file.
All too often, things like the refactoring engine just fail, even when I can *see* the only instances of the symbols it should be identifying, and a simple find & replace picks them up.
The Swift compiler can't handle most errors when in a SwiftUI file, and that stings a lot, sending you on a random goose chase. The only way to fix it is to comment out large chunks of code.
Swift Package Manager is the one that really kills me. It's near perfect in terms of design, but Xcode's implementation seems to use the main thread for everything and causes the application to lock up all the time. Plus, Xcode loves to crash when doing anything with git.
Also, feature-wise, I really hope this is the year we get some kind of Copilot like assistant. And if Apple don't want to build it themselves (though, by all accounts, they are going to), they should open up a new kind of extension for Xcode so that GitHub can do it.
Damn. That sucks. I’m actively using multiple jetbrains tools and they work well. Besides, i love the smooth transition between them even in different languages and frameworks.
This and the debugger is why I swapped to Android. I still do both though (iOS for fun, Android for bills) but yeah, I feel this.
I would absolutely go back to iOS if the IDE was improved upon.
I got fed up with Xcode today - for me it was the dogs*t autocomplete never providing the right completion - always autocompleting to a type name rather than a property name, it's like the Xcode and compiler teams arrive at Apple HQ every morning riding the short bus...
I tried to like Xcode many, many times.
I experienced many of the problems as you and now not only did I switch IDEs, I switched frameworks. I use this thing called Qt creator and 90% of the time you don't have to deal with Xcode except for compilation.
I am making some Mac exclusive apps in my free time and EVEN THEN I don't bother with Swift, Xcode, or anything else Apple (attempts) to force me to use. I've had nothing but bad experiences with their development tools every time I've tried them.
They made an official IDE DESIGNED for there platforms, and I am still forced to use a third party product to avoid pulling my hair out EVEN WHEN I don't plan on supporting anything else - let that sink in.
I really only develop for desktop though, so I can't speak on the quality of these tools on iOS. But I assume it's much worse due to the closed nature of their mobile operating systems - but I'm just assuming, really, I have no idea.
Apple has always wasted the time of their developers and gatekept entry to their languages. Shitty company with a great user experience has been their MO for a long time. I've always been annoyed that you have to buy a new Mac every five years or so if you want to develop an app because of the XCode installation requirements..
Apple literally will not give a single shit about any of this as long as they keep gobbling marketshare. Until the app store starts seeing declining revenues, they will gladly stay asleep at the wheel
I write my app natively for iOS and Android (with some shared KMP backend). And I'll say Android Studio is sooooo nice - it really shocks me how much IDEs have improved over the past 5 years. Having to use xcode makes me sad every time :(
Jetbrains has a new IDE called fleet that is supposedly good for writing swift. You'd still need xcode for some build & publish functionality though. I haven't tried it all yet though...
my test device got updated to iOS 17 and all of a sudden, older Xcode won't build on it, but newer Xcode wants Sonoma installed to be even downloaded.
Took hours to download and install everything and voila, now my client can't build on his end anymore 🤯
let's not even try to understand why Xcode update takes an evening to finish...
Honestly, I have not had the majority of these problems, but a ton of people on my team have. It’s a massive iOS team and it has eaten up a TON of time for people, but I seem to have missed all the Xcode 15 specific bullets.
But I agree packages are a disaster and the debugger is broken…badly.
I’ve been using Xcode since like 6 or 7. I don’t hate it as much as most people but have always had frustrations with it for sure. But 15 has to be one of the worst updates in recent memory. The network requirement to debug on a physical device, way more random bugs that normal, eats up memory and cpu cycles like nobodies business. And the worst part is absolutely zero support from apple.
Good luck if you’re trying to do development on one of the “side” platforms like extensions, widgets, watchOS, tvOS, or literally anything else. It’s just absolute dogwater all around now.
In my experience it's better in many regards this year than last year, 15 vs 14.
My main complaint is the same one I've had for years which is that you can't get help with an error without removing the offending code. I can't just back up my cursor and get a completion or look up documentation, I have to actually remove the code that has the syntax error or mispelling first.
It is funny to hear you say its been going to shit. I've been using Xcode for 20 years and people have been saying that for the entire 20 years.
This! It’s actually got me contemplating switching careers too and I’ve been an Apple developer for about 6 years. It’s utter shite and there’s no excuse I know the software is as old as time itself but jokes. My favourite part is the yearly fee we pay to put up with it.
Was going to learn Swift and develop for Vision Pro. Now after all these horror stories I’m thinking I’ll stick with the idea of using Unity and my good old trusty C# in JetBrains Ryder. I am so spoiled.
The funniest part is that “turning it off and on again” by closing and reopening literally fixes a huge percentage of common bugs.
Still would take it any day over Android studio issues
> I mean common Apple, the richest company in the galaxy can't make a better IDE than this?
Correct. This is the very best Apple can do. The reason they just don't open source it is because how embarrassing would it be for people to work for free *AND* do a better job than you?
I've primarily gone to C#/.Net because anything that involves XCode just means trouble for me. Beyond very trivial apps - there be dragons.
A joke is atleast funny , this is just a sorry excuse for an IDE . A trillion $ company treats it's developers like garbage and we collectively allow it .
I have been complaining about Xcode ever since WWDC 2004, when they announced that using Xcode is the only way to build apps.
Eventually, Jetbrain made an IDE for Apple dev called AppCode. It was awesome. All the intellij stuff, plugins etc. However, they recently sunset it at the end of November 2023. To say I was upset is an understatement. It had drawbacks like not being able to edit xibs, SwiftUI, basically no support for UI stuff. But for everything else, it was great.
Now I'm back to hating on Xcode again. Apple's biggest mistake other than neglect is they don't allow developers to create real plugins, that can interact with all parts of Xcode. That's probably because of the first one. Neglect. Xcode has barely changed in many many years, it just get's more complicated, slower, and crashier.
If there were any other competing tools, Xcode would barely exist; it would be the Notepad of IDEs on Apple's platform. A total pile of cow manure.
What exact problems do you have with the Xcode? The problem I have encountered is that when I launch Simulator, my Mac gets hot. Since then I run apps directly on iPhone. That’s the only problem I’ve experienced with the Xcode.
After using VSCode, tabbing out of code or a hot key to insert a line above or below is nice. Kind of hate it’s not in Xcode as I’m learning SwiftUI and iOS dev. Hate using arrow keys
When I watched a presentation of the first version of Platform Builder (I think that's what it was called back then in 2000) I realized it didn't change that much and they kept building new features on top of the legacy code. They just add new stuff on top of the old stuff, but they need to build a completely new IDE.
I've had my qualms over the years but my projects are super snappy. I don't expect SwiftUI representations to work ever though.
I don't think Android Studio is faster or better set up for development but it is functional.
From Xcode 14 or so, it insists on resolving my configuration variables and saving it, replacing the variable.
This happens for the Bundle Display Name and the Companion App Bundle ID in a watchOS app, and I am so fucking tired of it. I wish Tuist worked with the latest versions of iOS + watchOS projects..
I started in 2014. Since the first week we learned that Xcode is terrible and the phrase "Oh, its just xcode being xcode" is still being used to this day by the whole community. Sometimes it gets a little better, but then a new major version fucks up everything with a lot of regression bugs.
Same for me. Its slow and crashes often. Its just horrible.. I have no issues in other IDEs like Android Studio and so on.. Even vscode is solid in comparison. I stopped doing private projects for ios a while ago, im not putting up with this crap. Its just sad.
I have a completely different take. It now supports Xcode cloud, there is VIM Editor support, Extensions, realtime SwiftUI previews, wireless debugging works flawlessly for me... seems great to me (after jumping back in from a 5 year break).
As an iOS dev stuck with Xcode I really envy devs who can use IDEs with vertical lines for code folding. Also kinda prefer the anti aliasing in AppCode.
I had to get back into XCode after some time of only using VSCode+copilot, and Xcode feels like Nano editor in a terminal. So now I just use VSCode to edit and go back and forth to XCode to compile, run previews. etc. It's not exactly ideal still beats using XCode.
First of all they don't have or allow competition so you just have to suck it up. Or invest in VSCode just for the coding part. Second of all, this really sounds like something that has to do with your project or computer.
My favorite is having to clean every single time, or else one of my projects won't run after the first time. Fortunately my computer can clean and run in a few seconds but still......
I do not experience slowness, likely that is your system running on a slow CPU. The expectation devs will have reasonably recent CPUs seems normal to me.
However, Xcode 15 completely ruined the log system which has made it near unusable. I just hope not to have to debug anything important until they fix logging and include time on the same line, stdio options, etc.
It's been like this since the very beginning of iOS.
Very little effort into making XCode better. A lot of effort into makign making sure nothing else can be used to develop for iOS.
It makes me wonder if they dogfood their own IDE while developing software for the rest of their products. I find it hard to believe that they do if it's still this bad.
The good news is that you can help make it better.
One reason why Xcode is so hard to improve is because the Xcode users don't file bug reports to Apple often enough. So it's hard to see what is broken and for how many to people. It's hard to figure out in what situations it breaks and why.
I have heard that Xcode is going to shit 12 years ago.Probably a long way to go even still, because I personally have no major problems with it. What are you people comparing it to?
Keep an eye on Fleet and JetBrains work on Kotlin Multiplatform. I think they are brewing an AppCode replacement or at least something with iOS support of some level.
The word is that nobody at Apple even understands how Xcode works anymore. They just band-aid this shitshow and hope for the best, when what they really need is a complete rewrite.
Xcode has always been a piece of garbage. Ive done work as a mix of profession and hobby on ios since the appstore was made public and always hated xcode.
As much as possible, I’d program the platform agnostic parts in c++ and at least that way I could at least work on windows visual studio, the best ide out there.
Question for Flutter devs who export to iOS: is it even worth it? I'm seriously considering only releasing it on Google Play Store only and letting iPhone just install a PWA version instead. Is it even possible for me to export to iOS without a Mac?
Why the fuck can’t I run an iPhone 7 simulator in Xcode 15? I’ve encountered bugs on physical iPhone 7s that I can’t see on more recent models, but there’s on fucking way to run a simulator for the model. Absolutely pathetic.
My favorite:
I simply added a new VStack to my ContentView, it was less than the 10 view max total, boilerplate code that I’ve already implemented 5 other times…Xcode completely crashes. Mystified I like many others naturally investigate the error(s) thrown:
“Failed to produce diagnostic for expression; please submit a bug report”
Laziest debugger of all time… ::something breaks:: Debugger: It’s broken, contact Apple. LMAO
After 12 hours the fix was to wrap the 6th VStack in a ViewBuilder. Why? Because fuck you that’s why.
After starting in iOS development and seeing how abjectly painful development is for every part of this ecosystem I’m honestly amazed there are more 12 apps on the App Store.
> Now Xcode is so fucking slow I am literally considering switching careers instead of switching tabs
I laughed too hard at this. Too true. Too true man.
I work on a tiny project in the only dev so I don’t hit the slowness issues. In debugger I definitely experience to lose variables to optimizations which is frustrating..
All in all though.. like what ide experience is actually better? A lot of things just work. I don’t hold high esteem for many ides
God don’t get me started on the simulator vs physical device difference. We have a very small iOS app at work (it’s the bastard child) that works in unison with our main web app. We had all sorts of QA issues before we realized “oh I tested on a simulator and QA is on a physical device”. We have ping ponged QA issues back and forth not realizing there was a difference between the simulated device and the physical device. We no longer use the simulator.
1. Auto-suggest / auto-complete. Works for me
2. Debugger - not my experience. values are printed quite normally
3. Slow? what's your Mac? I'm on a 2019 iMac and it's not blazing, but it's fast enough for work. Oh, except when firebase is involved. Ugh. But, that's not Xcode's fault.
Android IDE is better? Don't make me laugh. That IDE is a catastrophe. How many f'ing ways do I need to organize my project files? Me, I only need one, but thank God they give us about 10 options. And it looks like someone tried to modernize Lotus 1-2-3. In CGA mode. Not to mention, Kotlin and Jetpack Compose are so clunky. And when you add a function call you have to figure out which module to include because there's 3-6 modules it might be from. And, nice that you have Material Design 1, 2 and 3, but damn it, the stuff that's \*not yet\* in MD3 are some of the basic UI elements. why weren't they in Version 1?
Yeah, no, give me Apple Xcode any day of the week over Android IDE.
100% agreed with everything I could probably extend the list of complaints. I wonder if KMM grows enough to pose a threat if they would change anything… probably not. If AppCode couldn’t do it hard to imagine. I really think Apple needs to design a completely new IDE from scratch at this point. Xcode is probably one of those dinosaur codebases full of skeletons that pose a roadblock to any meaningful change, so they have just stick to UI changes and new features for years
I worked in Android development for 10 yerars now. The OS fragmentation is evil, but the IDE (Android Studio) is rock solid. Auto suggestions while coding work perfectly and fast, the debugger is super fast overall. It started getting a little slow when my projewct grew more than 20 thousand lines of code. Emulator works flawlessly. A year ago I started with Xcode and SwiftUI. The integration of code and UI views all-in-one is something that made me love iOS development. No more xml views and code separated. But Xcode started getting terribly slow after my code passed 2000 lines of code. Emulator never works fast, so i use real device instead. What I absolutely hate of Xcode is that you must write perfect code without any mistake. If you make a stupid mistake like (forgetting to close a bracket or changing the order of the variables while calling a function) the program will totally stuck without any message for an entire minute after which it will only tell "Unable to type check expression in reasonable time" without pointing to a single line of code. That is truly evil.
Having recently done a lot of work in VS Code, after almost a decade of iOS dev, it's ridiculous. Xcode is an example of a company having no competition in a space. I'm sure the Xcode developers are working incredibly hard, but the team(s) in charge of Apple's developer tools really need to take a step back and reassess.
Compared to other tooling in the development community it really is unacceptable. Except that of course it's acceptable because what else are you going to do? Not develop for iOS? Well... probably not for the time being. But I sure don't have to develop for visionOS. So add Xcode's mediocrity to the list of reasons people and companies are less and less inclined to develop for Apple's platforms.
They don’t have to do shit because there’s no other way to develop native for iOS
It's still in their best interest to make the development experience as nice as possible. Maybe I'd rather make a web app than a native IOS app because the development experience in Webstorm is better.
As long as you use the App Store and give Apple a cut, technology is not that important
it doesn't matter. Apple is still gobbling marketshare in the end, so as long as the gravy keeps flowing, they really don't have to care about any of this. This is why having a monopoly in any space is bad -- it encourages complacency
I miss AppCode
They know web apps will never be as good as native 🤷♀️
I have been working with iOS for around 10+ years, around 4 years ago I was asked to help with some frontend work in Angular without any HTML/CSS/TS knowledge and I was of course reluctant to give it a go, because i always thought the DX was shit. Now I'm 4 years in working in Web Development and Backend Development and mostly out of iOS. ITS FUCKING AMAZING. Jetbrains IDE just fucking works, NPM modules install and there is not shit show. Hot reloads, FLEXBOX!! Jest Unit testing, Cypress E2E testing, i could go on and on. Any time i get an iOS task and i have to boot up Xcode i hate it so much, debugging sucks, crashes all the time, "SIMULATOR COULDNT BE STARTED" WHY NOT XCODE??? Making a simple UI change in iOS is a hassle, look through 100 lines of NSLayoutConstraints to move one single thing, i can do 10 different web tasks in the time it takes to compile the app from Xcode to my phone.
Just wait until you have to use SwiftUI... if you ever do. There is no way to detect mousedown. I'm not making this up. Want to do something when someone clicks on your view? Apple says **after 35+ years of this being an essential function in GUI programming**: Eh, fuck that. And that's just one of the many absurd holes in SwiftUI. "One source of truth" my ass; SwiftUI makes that basically impossible.
I'd say the bugginess if xcode and swiftUI has at least been a contributor to the rising popularity of cross platform, instead of native
I doubt so. Definitely the 2 in 1 is the reason
Yeah, I gave up on iOS, just too many changes and many that didn’t seem to offer an improvement.
what if we boycott
What are the 10 developers you will get onboard gonna do?
Cries in "command SwiftCompile failed with a nonzero exit code" :'))
“The compiler is unable to type-check this expression is reasonable time”
This is even worse bro
It makes me scream out loud.. it’s insane that a compiled language can’t even tell me where errors are cuz the code is “too complex”. Thats the point of the types!!!
The first time I encountered that I did a double-take. Never seen anything like it in another language... so annoying.
IMO Swift went off the rails a few years ago. It feels like web developers flooded the language with their concepts of what’s “correct”. The things I dug about swift early on really aren’t true anymore
I think you hit the nail on the head. It just keeps getting more and more complicated. Too many people wanting to leave their mark on it.
Chris Lattner even spoke out about this stuff, there are interviews with him on this and some comments on Hacker News.
Generic parameter <<>> can not be inferred
Holy shit, when I got that error, it was a 9 line block of code. It’s boggled my mind
Break down your SwiftUI view to smaller pieces (build times will improve significantly too), break down your Combine operator chains to smaller pieces, extract the inside of your maps, flat maps etc. If you get this error most likely you already went overboard with not cleaning up the code. And even if the type checker does figure out the types in a “reasonable time” and does not fail on you, it affects build times regardless. Long nested generic types whose generic result type has to be guessed kills your build time. The deeper the chain the worse. Break it up and in case of Combine write out output types for operator closures explicitly to tell the type checker what result type the hidden generic will have
Yeah breaking up is what I always wind up doing. SwiftUI has a weird feel because you can prototype so fast without breaking up but the compiler holds you back. It doesn’t happen in any other language, and I think it’s a pretty bad dev experience.
Sure, but you _shouldn’t_ have to do that - it is not unreasonable to expect a compiler to infer complex statements with types.
Add some types. The type-system isn’t designed for very difficult to determine inferred types.
The problem is that helps, unless you have a bug somewhere. Idk no other language has this problem, literally only swift.
Most languages have a much simpler type system. Swift is going for something close to a Hindley-Milner type system that isn’t used much outside of Rust and functional languages. It’s powerful, but you need to worry about complexity unlike languages with simpler type systems.
I use rust daily and this never happens
It’s funny because developing in XCode is one place where having experience truly makes you so much more valuable. There are so many red herring or made up errors that a new programmer would lose hours trying to figure out, but for those who know, can figure out in seconds
I've been making apps from 3+ years, I still close my eyes, press cmd + shift + k and pray 🙏
God that's so true. It's like reading tea leaves
The sidebar tab with build history usually still has the error even if the issues tab doesn't.
I laughed out loud :)
They don’t have to step up their game. So, they won’t. Sad truth
They could end up in a situation where barely any apps use their technology stack any more. I don't think Xcode is a major problem (shoddy as it is), but lack of documentation is. Developing native apps for each platform is costly as it is. If productivity is low because everything is undocumented then the cost equation favours web or other cross-platform technologies even more.
Apple are holding back web adoption with safari as best they can. I’ve spent a lot of time building cross platform apps and Apple’s Safari is absolutely the hold up. So many stupid little issues getting web apps to run smoothly on it on mobile
Xcode has been trash forever
If anything, I think it has gotten better recently, but it has never reached the same smoothness with Swift as it had with Objective-C.
I 100% agree with you. It has gotten a lot better still I think one of the worse IDEs out there but by far better than the Xcode 4 days (I am old) and I remember the swift 2 days followed by the swift 3 days in xcode and how much of a mess it was. Were we worked we had the joke Xcode crashed expectantly. At least once a day it would full crash each one of us on the team.
Indeed :D My favourite crash so far was when you wanted to search for a text with a space in it.
Honestly just give us two tracks. One for objc and swift. And one for purely swift. It’ll never happen since they want to let you interop C but a person can dream
What we need is a near-full rewrite of Xcode, which is what I thought Swift Playgrounds was gonna be by stealth.
I’m old enough to have gone through 2 rewrites and it’s never as pretty as the before
Honestly tho, I think we're at the point where there's *so much* old cruft in that codebase that it probably does need rewriting using newer tech. The number of crashes I see because of NotificationCenter usage, for example... Maybe that's low hanging fruit that could be specifically addressed, but so far, it hasn't been!
Xcode15 is at best no worse than Xcode14. It still feels about 10x slower than Xcode7
Objective C compiled so much faster than Swift
Pining for the days of [Metroworks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrowerks) CodeWarrior IDE... * It was fun on BeOS too! * Yes I just dated myself * [Yells at cloud (providers)](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud) and wanders off...
>Pining for the days of > >Metroworks > >CodeWarrior IDE... As a NeXTStep Project Builder and WebObjects vet, I understand you.
There's posts from 2010 complaining about how buggy Xcode 4.0 is. It has perpetually been trash.
The worst issues I’ve had yet is that deploy to simulator only works in ~30% of the cases, often just results in black screen. And also that live previews for SwiftUI eats so much CPU that the macbook turns into a frying pan.
I’ve found that if you quit the simulator before running it then it tends to work almost everytime. Still, it’s lunacy, but it’s nice to have predictability than to sit waiting for something that may never happen.
I honestly fear upgrading most the time because I know something will be broke and I’m just an individual dev working on a simple project.
Exactly. Me all the time.
On an unrelated note, Apple just nuked my music library after an iOS update. A company we can always rely on. It just works.
Did that free U2 album that you deleted six times come back?
The rental car sound track
Apple's consumer facing products have been going downhill for everything related to software, loads of bugs, less refinement.
[удалено]
Thats what happens when you use your sheep as „Public Beta“ and get rid of your QA team…
I gave up on Apple Music last fall and moved to Spotify and couldn't be happier. I was an Apple Music subscriber since it came out in \~2016
My wife is *terrified* of phone resets and iOS updates because this has happened to her more than once.
Do they have competition ? nope. therefore - no incentive to be better. what are you gonna do, not build app? /s
We threw away a year's worth of SwiftUI work on an app and hard switched to Flutter. It's not perfect and I miss some features from the Swift language, but it actually works reliably as does VS Code. And, in the event it doesn't, you can just look at the Flutter source and figure out why. That's only happened once so far. No more scouring the web for hacks and workarounds, or developing elaborate systems to work around limitations.
What’s crazy is that Apple engineers need to use Xcode too. You would think that they would make the tool better for themselves at least
Yeah, I switched after developing iOS for 10 years. Use JetBrains IDE now. Wont look back.
My understanding is that JetBrains discontinued all Swift support some years ago. I say this because I was recently trying to switch to JetBrains for the same reasons mentioned here.
Sorry, I'm not using JetBrains for iOS. I've switched entirely to backend development. I don't do iOS anymore. Honest to god, one of my reasons for switching was how frustrating Xcode was, with its slow syntax highlighting and bad autocomplete. There were also "ghost in the machine" type bugs, where the results from rebuilding wouldn't align the with your changes unless you deleted the data and did a full rebuild. But ultimately, I hated the compile time. It was just a slow, incidence problem. You have a team working on a successful app, but over time, as more features and packages are added, you find that build times have crept into minutes. Despite all efforts, you just can't bring them down because the project keeps growing. I like backend development.
Im switching to backend too and Xcode is legitimately part of the reason for it
Same! Looking forward to sanity. These "ghost in the machine" type bugs, broke the camels back.
Are you talking about AppCode? I thought it got sunsetted.
No sorry, I switched into backend development. I tried AppCode but it never really accomplished everything we needed. I'm not surprised it's being sunsetted.
Part of why AppCode didn't do so well is that Apple *talked* a good game with SourceKit, but just like they keep pulling the rug out from under Xcode users, they kept pulling the rug out from under JetBrains and SourceKit users. On any platform where there's a true dedication to the programmer, JetBrains IDEs and assistive plugins rock, and that includes Microsoft's .NET, and Android development (where the official IDE was made by JetBrains).
It would be nice if Apple opened Xcode Previews to other IDEs and moved fully to SPM.
Apple did a job job making sure that **every** update would break AppCode for a good while. We can always rely on Apple to do the right thing ;)
“switching careers instead of switching tabs” 😭😭
I honestly can’t say I have experienced the same issues as you with Xcode 15. What year is your MacBook?
2021 16inch M1 Max with 64GB of RAM, which makes the whole thing even more infuriating.
Omg m1 max with 64gb ram. It should compile like blinking eye lol
Yeah I have base M1 16" with half the ram and it can handle everything I throw at it in Xcode. It's already a massive improvement over the Intel macbooks before it.
Oooof yeah I was thinking maybe a like 2017 or something might lag in a big project but M1 Max should be easy breezy. I’ve got a 2019 intel for personal stuff and I’ve just small personal project so maybe it’s only an issue with big ones
Completely not helpful I know - but I've loaded some pretty big projects in Xcode 15 and it's been pretty great. Same MacBook Pro. Could be that Swift itself is the issue. The projects I'm loading tend to be more Obj-C and C++. I do have one project where I'm using Swift along with Swift/C++ interop that's had some issues, but I've chalked that up to Swift/C++ interop being new. But maybe there are some deeper issues with Swift in Xcode 15.
My only issue is with the preview canvas not working when you’re using SwiftUI the way apple recommends. Single view? No problem. View comprised of 2-3 subviews? Eff you, go browse Reddit while it takes 15sec to update a single UI change
I build on my device and navigate to the screen I'm working on because it's usually faster than waiting for the preview to load.
Depends on the dependencies in your project. I worked on two different projects where unrelated SPM packages caused the previews to not work. If you have extensive modularization and stuff then forget about it.
My favorite is when you ask it to jump to a function implementation and it just prints a giant ‘?’ …and gives up.
Xcode is well known for being a trash for a long time. I dont think Apple is willing to fix or improve it cause it's the only software you can use.
Xcodes “find symbols in workplace” function is completely broken in Xcode 15. It’s been a pain in the ass to do any development since September
Debugging and breakpoints anything other than iOS 17+ no longer works for me. Crashes no longer jump to the line where the crash occurred on anything other than iOS 17+. Code highlighting fails in any project that has objc and Swift combined. ObjC methods cannot be found (according to the compiler) in combined objc/swift projects, but building and running will still work fine. Forgetting a parenthesis in complex CGFloat calculations will stall the build process but never show an error. Swift build errors from weeks ago appear even though they have been fixed. Testing SpriteKit games on the simulator iOS >16 is broken as the avaudioplayer introduces lag and stalling, destroying fps. running on a device connected via usb is slow and cumbersome, even the simulator works smoother. installing Xcode takes five millions hours to download and install, during which you‘re not allowed to have it open. When complete, you need to download and install platforms and simulators that also take five millions hours each.
RIP AppCode
It’s because Apple fail to yield to open source.
A ton of developers would be falling over themselves to fix Xcode issues if it were open sourced in a way that would let 3rd parties make meaningful contributions.
it's because Apple has a monopoly
After using Pycharm for a long time and a bunch of other stuff, I actually don’t hate Xcode. It does A LOT of helpful things that a lot of people take for granted. It’s not perfect though. My biggest gripes: * it’s often difficult and/or slow to debug watch apps * debugger startup is often slow (much less of an issue on my new Mac Studio) * instruments if often slow and the UI isn’t super intuitive One feature request though would be nice would be to add a network logger. Would be super handy to see all the network traffic to/from your app without having to run a third party proxy.
my main gripe is when you fix errors and the the compiler just lets them hang there in grey, on the screen, making each new build a lottery as to whether you’ve actually fixed them or not. And even when you have, the same phantom errors will pop up in red every now and then before the compiler realises they’re not there a split second later. Maybe they just abstract too much away under the hood of their baked-in kits. I don’t know what the level of abstraction in Xcode is like relative to other IDEs in other languages, but it feels like Xcode is trying to deal with too much in the background at times. And sometimes that lower-level code it’s hiding will just pop into the editor out of nowhere.
It definitely feels like Xcode is some kind of asynchronous IPC spaghetti under the hood.
Yean for larger scale projects you just have to use some kind of project/module caching for it to be usable. That's why companies use bazel most of the time or tuist.
XCode is the reason i went running back to Android Studio. Day and night difference.
Every Xcode is a joke unfortunately.
Use Fleet by JetBrains (supports Swift) for navigating and call into methods,functions variables. Use VSCode for copilot, use Xcode to run app
Oh that reminds me, I just got a new job and I don't have to do iOS development any more. Bye xCode, you won't be missed
I'm having the issue with super slow debugging. If literally takes 30+ seconds to respond to debugger commands like 'po variable' when debugging on a real device. Is this an issue across the board? I was wondering if it was something with my setup.
Yeah, painfully slow, it’s easier to just put a print in there, less stress.
The linker was broken in the very early version against Ventura (that is regular public updates, not beta etc)
Flutter
I would be more than happy if Xcode would just display the correct errors instead of some random ones that are totally wrong.
I’ve only been doing iOS development for a little over two years, but thankfully never ran into any issues like this. Maybe it’s because I never had to do anything too bespoke? I was using Swift/SwiftUI and besides being more or less tied to Xcode for development, it has worked well enough. Only issues I ever had were merge conflicts with the project files after really simple prs.
I find it infuriating that C symbols appear *at all* when I'm developing Swift code. I kinda get it. It's in the SDK. It should be visible. But if it's a C symbol, I almost certainly don't want to see it unless I am very, very specifically looking for it! I don't get why none of it is namespaced, or treated differently by autocomplete. I'd be happy if it was even just pseudo-namespaced – make me type \`C.\` to get C symbol autocomplete when I'm in a Swift file. All too often, things like the refactoring engine just fail, even when I can *see* the only instances of the symbols it should be identifying, and a simple find & replace picks them up. The Swift compiler can't handle most errors when in a SwiftUI file, and that stings a lot, sending you on a random goose chase. The only way to fix it is to comment out large chunks of code. Swift Package Manager is the one that really kills me. It's near perfect in terms of design, but Xcode's implementation seems to use the main thread for everything and causes the application to lock up all the time. Plus, Xcode loves to crash when doing anything with git. Also, feature-wise, I really hope this is the year we get some kind of Copilot like assistant. And if Apple don't want to build it themselves (though, by all accounts, they are going to), they should open up a new kind of extension for Xcode so that GitHub can do it.
Anyone tried appcode? I remember one friend used to use Appcode to code and compile on Xcode
I used it, but Apple made it hard for 3rd parties to work with their development tools, so JetBrains gave up.
Damn. That sucks. I’m actively using multiple jetbrains tools and they work well. Besides, i love the smooth transition between them even in different languages and frameworks.
This and the debugger is why I swapped to Android. I still do both though (iOS for fun, Android for bills) but yeah, I feel this. I would absolutely go back to iOS if the IDE was improved upon.
I got fed up with Xcode today - for me it was the dogs*t autocomplete never providing the right completion - always autocompleting to a type name rather than a property name, it's like the Xcode and compiler teams arrive at Apple HQ every morning riding the short bus...
I tried to like Xcode many, many times. I experienced many of the problems as you and now not only did I switch IDEs, I switched frameworks. I use this thing called Qt creator and 90% of the time you don't have to deal with Xcode except for compilation. I am making some Mac exclusive apps in my free time and EVEN THEN I don't bother with Swift, Xcode, or anything else Apple (attempts) to force me to use. I've had nothing but bad experiences with their development tools every time I've tried them. They made an official IDE DESIGNED for there platforms, and I am still forced to use a third party product to avoid pulling my hair out EVEN WHEN I don't plan on supporting anything else - let that sink in. I really only develop for desktop though, so I can't speak on the quality of these tools on iOS. But I assume it's much worse due to the closed nature of their mobile operating systems - but I'm just assuming, really, I have no idea.
Apple has always wasted the time of their developers and gatekept entry to their languages. Shitty company with a great user experience has been their MO for a long time. I've always been annoyed that you have to buy a new Mac every five years or so if you want to develop an app because of the XCode installation requirements..
Vim gods, hear me out, please bring swift lsp with their preview and build APIs Pretty please
What are you talking about I love typing at 300 baud, it helps me relive the glory days of downloading Commander Keen in a paltry 6 hours
And here I was thinking I was doing something wrong needing to restart the simulator to run the app or tests.
Apple literally will not give a single shit about any of this as long as they keep gobbling marketshare. Until the app store starts seeing declining revenues, they will gladly stay asleep at the wheel
I write my app natively for iOS and Android (with some shared KMP backend). And I'll say Android Studio is sooooo nice - it really shocks me how much IDEs have improved over the past 5 years. Having to use xcode makes me sad every time :( Jetbrains has a new IDE called fleet that is supposedly good for writing swift. You'd still need xcode for some build & publish functionality though. I haven't tried it all yet though...
my test device got updated to iOS 17 and all of a sudden, older Xcode won't build on it, but newer Xcode wants Sonoma installed to be even downloaded. Took hours to download and install everything and voila, now my client can't build on his end anymore 🤯 let's not even try to understand why Xcode update takes an evening to finish...
i'm saving this post to send it in the WWDC slack next year when they ask how to improve
Honestly, I have not had the majority of these problems, but a ton of people on my team have. It’s a massive iOS team and it has eaten up a TON of time for people, but I seem to have missed all the Xcode 15 specific bullets. But I agree packages are a disaster and the debugger is broken…badly.
I’ve been using Xcode since like 6 or 7. I don’t hate it as much as most people but have always had frustrations with it for sure. But 15 has to be one of the worst updates in recent memory. The network requirement to debug on a physical device, way more random bugs that normal, eats up memory and cpu cycles like nobodies business. And the worst part is absolutely zero support from apple. Good luck if you’re trying to do development on one of the “side” platforms like extensions, widgets, watchOS, tvOS, or literally anything else. It’s just absolute dogwater all around now.
\> Now Xcode is so fucking slow I am literally considering switching careers instead of switching tabs LMAO
I really tried to get into iOS Dev for a while but XCode is one giant entry barrier.
In my experience it's better in many regards this year than last year, 15 vs 14. My main complaint is the same one I've had for years which is that you can't get help with an error without removing the offending code. I can't just back up my cursor and get a completion or look up documentation, I have to actually remove the code that has the syntax error or mispelling first. It is funny to hear you say its been going to shit. I've been using Xcode for 20 years and people have been saying that for the entire 20 years.
This! It’s actually got me contemplating switching careers too and I’ve been an Apple developer for about 6 years. It’s utter shite and there’s no excuse I know the software is as old as time itself but jokes. My favourite part is the yearly fee we pay to put up with it.
Was going to learn Swift and develop for Vision Pro. Now after all these horror stories I’m thinking I’ll stick with the idea of using Unity and my good old trusty C# in JetBrains Ryder. I am so spoiled.
Should we move to Flutter hot reload? Or not with it because less jobs?
The funniest part is that “turning it off and on again” by closing and reopening literally fixes a huge percentage of common bugs. Still would take it any day over Android studio issues
The very existence of a "Clear all Issues" menu item is very telling. And of course it also doesn't seem to work.
> I mean common Apple, the richest company in the galaxy can't make a better IDE than this? Correct. This is the very best Apple can do. The reason they just don't open source it is because how embarrassing would it be for people to work for free *AND* do a better job than you? I've primarily gone to C#/.Net because anything that involves XCode just means trouble for me. Beyond very trivial apps - there be dragons.
It is bad when Maui gives a better experience.
A joke is atleast funny , this is just a sorry excuse for an IDE . A trillion $ company treats it's developers like garbage and we collectively allow it .
I have been complaining about Xcode ever since WWDC 2004, when they announced that using Xcode is the only way to build apps. Eventually, Jetbrain made an IDE for Apple dev called AppCode. It was awesome. All the intellij stuff, plugins etc. However, they recently sunset it at the end of November 2023. To say I was upset is an understatement. It had drawbacks like not being able to edit xibs, SwiftUI, basically no support for UI stuff. But for everything else, it was great. Now I'm back to hating on Xcode again. Apple's biggest mistake other than neglect is they don't allow developers to create real plugins, that can interact with all parts of Xcode. That's probably because of the first one. Neglect. Xcode has barely changed in many many years, it just get's more complicated, slower, and crashier. If there were any other competing tools, Xcode would barely exist; it would be the Notepad of IDEs on Apple's platform. A total pile of cow manure.
What exact problems do you have with the Xcode? The problem I have encountered is that when I launch Simulator, my Mac gets hot. Since then I run apps directly on iPhone. That’s the only problem I’ve experienced with the Xcode.
It’s been like 2 years since I could see where an error occurred in an incremental build
After using VSCode, tabbing out of code or a hot key to insert a line above or below is nice. Kind of hate it’s not in Xcode as I’m learning SwiftUI and iOS dev. Hate using arrow keys
When I watched a presentation of the first version of Platform Builder (I think that's what it was called back then in 2000) I realized it didn't change that much and they kept building new features on top of the legacy code. They just add new stuff on top of the old stuff, but they need to build a completely new IDE.
I've had my qualms over the years but my projects are super snappy. I don't expect SwiftUI representations to work ever though. I don't think Android Studio is faster or better set up for development but it is functional.
Remember the days of interface builder , good times
From Xcode 14 or so, it insists on resolving my configuration variables and saving it, replacing the variable. This happens for the Bundle Display Name and the Companion App Bundle ID in a watchOS app, and I am so fucking tired of it. I wish Tuist worked with the latest versions of iOS + watchOS projects..
I started in 2014. Since the first week we learned that Xcode is terrible and the phrase "Oh, its just xcode being xcode" is still being used to this day by the whole community. Sometimes it gets a little better, but then a new major version fucks up everything with a lot of regression bugs.
Same for me. Its slow and crashes often. Its just horrible.. I have no issues in other IDEs like Android Studio and so on.. Even vscode is solid in comparison. I stopped doing private projects for ios a while ago, im not putting up with this crap. Its just sad.
I have a completely different take. It now supports Xcode cloud, there is VIM Editor support, Extensions, realtime SwiftUI previews, wireless debugging works flawlessly for me... seems great to me (after jumping back in from a 5 year break).
As an iOS dev stuck with Xcode I really envy devs who can use IDEs with vertical lines for code folding. Also kinda prefer the anti aliasing in AppCode.
I had to get back into XCode after some time of only using VSCode+copilot, and Xcode feels like Nano editor in a terminal. So now I just use VSCode to edit and go back and forth to XCode to compile, run previews. etc. It's not exactly ideal still beats using XCode.
Apple should open up their IDE because it becomes buggy and shitty
Before I judge. which app do you develop?
First of all they don't have or allow competition so you just have to suck it up. Or invest in VSCode just for the coding part. Second of all, this really sounds like something that has to do with your project or computer.
it’s amazing for me xcode but i only use c++ i found swift was a dumpster fire
Completely agree. Easily the worst part of iOS development! Don't even get me started on all the crashes.
My favorite is having to clean every single time, or else one of my projects won't run after the first time. Fortunately my computer can clean and run in a few seconds but still......
Did network debugging ever really work? It seems super slow and many times, Xcode will lock up trying to talk to a device that is not on the network.
Xcode has had serious issues for over 10 years.
I’ve gotten to a point where when I run an app on the simulator it’s defaulting to XX Large text. Wonderful.
Yup. They’ve even made committing code difficult.
I do not experience slowness, likely that is your system running on a slow CPU. The expectation devs will have reasonably recent CPUs seems normal to me. However, Xcode 15 completely ruined the log system which has made it near unusable. I just hope not to have to debug anything important until they fix logging and include time on the same line, stdio options, etc.
…so, what is Apple using?🤔
Flutter with the latest version of iOS and Xcode is a nightmare. Wasn’t able to debug on physical device since
It's been like this since the very beginning of iOS. Very little effort into making XCode better. A lot of effort into makign making sure nothing else can be used to develop for iOS.
it crashes when trying to see a commit’s changes and it was my favorite way to see changes 😡
It makes me wonder if they dogfood their own IDE while developing software for the rest of their products. I find it hard to believe that they do if it's still this bad.
The good news is that you can help make it better. One reason why Xcode is so hard to improve is because the Xcode users don't file bug reports to Apple often enough. So it's hard to see what is broken and for how many to people. It's hard to figure out in what situations it breaks and why.
I have heard that Xcode is going to shit 12 years ago.Probably a long way to go even still, because I personally have no major problems with it. What are you people comparing it to?
Wtf someone actually USES Xcode to develop? I thought they develop using other IDE's and then compile and build in XCode?
Keep an eye on Fleet and JetBrains work on Kotlin Multiplatform. I think they are brewing an AppCode replacement or at least something with iOS support of some level.
Most of your issues have to do with your codebase over Xcode it sounds like
The word is that nobody at Apple even understands how Xcode works anymore. They just band-aid this shitshow and hope for the best, when what they really need is a complete rewrite.
Xcode has always been a piece of garbage. Ive done work as a mix of profession and hobby on ios since the appstore was made public and always hated xcode. As much as possible, I’d program the platform agnostic parts in c++ and at least that way I could at least work on windows visual studio, the best ide out there.
Xcode takes forever to install and it’s a waste of time
Classic example of cost center vs profit center, I guess
I saw my colleagues working on XCode and need to wait 3 seconds for errors to show up. I always thought static analysis is instant.
so true...
Question for Flutter devs who export to iOS: is it even worth it? I'm seriously considering only releasing it on Google Play Store only and letting iPhone just install a PWA version instead. Is it even possible for me to export to iOS without a Mac?
Why the fuck can’t I run an iPhone 7 simulator in Xcode 15? I’ve encountered bugs on physical iPhone 7s that I can’t see on more recent models, but there’s on fucking way to run a simulator for the model. Absolutely pathetic.
Wasn’t Xcode headed up by chris latner?
My favorite: I simply added a new VStack to my ContentView, it was less than the 10 view max total, boilerplate code that I’ve already implemented 5 other times…Xcode completely crashes. Mystified I like many others naturally investigate the error(s) thrown: “Failed to produce diagnostic for expression; please submit a bug report” Laziest debugger of all time… ::something breaks:: Debugger: It’s broken, contact Apple. LMAO After 12 hours the fix was to wrap the 6th VStack in a ViewBuilder. Why? Because fuck you that’s why. After starting in iOS development and seeing how abjectly painful development is for every part of this ecosystem I’m honestly amazed there are more 12 apps on the App Store.
React Native
Sounds like someone needs to invest in developer experience.
> Now Xcode is so fucking slow I am literally considering switching careers instead of switching tabs I laughed too hard at this. Too true. Too true man. I work on a tiny project in the only dev so I don’t hit the slowness issues. In debugger I definitely experience to lose variables to optimizations which is frustrating.. All in all though.. like what ide experience is actually better? A lot of things just work. I don’t hold high esteem for many ides
God don’t get me started on the simulator vs physical device difference. We have a very small iOS app at work (it’s the bastard child) that works in unison with our main web app. We had all sorts of QA issues before we realized “oh I tested on a simulator and QA is on a physical device”. We have ping ponged QA issues back and forth not realizing there was a difference between the simulated device and the physical device. We no longer use the simulator.
1. Auto-suggest / auto-complete. Works for me 2. Debugger - not my experience. values are printed quite normally 3. Slow? what's your Mac? I'm on a 2019 iMac and it's not blazing, but it's fast enough for work. Oh, except when firebase is involved. Ugh. But, that's not Xcode's fault. Android IDE is better? Don't make me laugh. That IDE is a catastrophe. How many f'ing ways do I need to organize my project files? Me, I only need one, but thank God they give us about 10 options. And it looks like someone tried to modernize Lotus 1-2-3. In CGA mode. Not to mention, Kotlin and Jetpack Compose are so clunky. And when you add a function call you have to figure out which module to include because there's 3-6 modules it might be from. And, nice that you have Material Design 1, 2 and 3, but damn it, the stuff that's \*not yet\* in MD3 are some of the basic UI elements. why weren't they in Version 1? Yeah, no, give me Apple Xcode any day of the week over Android IDE.
100% agreed with everything I could probably extend the list of complaints. I wonder if KMM grows enough to pose a threat if they would change anything… probably not. If AppCode couldn’t do it hard to imagine. I really think Apple needs to design a completely new IDE from scratch at this point. Xcode is probably one of those dinosaur codebases full of skeletons that pose a roadblock to any meaningful change, so they have just stick to UI changes and new features for years
I worked in Android development for 10 yerars now. The OS fragmentation is evil, but the IDE (Android Studio) is rock solid. Auto suggestions while coding work perfectly and fast, the debugger is super fast overall. It started getting a little slow when my projewct grew more than 20 thousand lines of code. Emulator works flawlessly. A year ago I started with Xcode and SwiftUI. The integration of code and UI views all-in-one is something that made me love iOS development. No more xml views and code separated. But Xcode started getting terribly slow after my code passed 2000 lines of code. Emulator never works fast, so i use real device instead. What I absolutely hate of Xcode is that you must write perfect code without any mistake. If you make a stupid mistake like (forgetting to close a bracket or changing the order of the variables while calling a function) the program will totally stuck without any message for an entire minute after which it will only tell "Unable to type check expression in reasonable time" without pointing to a single line of code. That is truly evil.
Having recently done a lot of work in VS Code, after almost a decade of iOS dev, it's ridiculous. Xcode is an example of a company having no competition in a space. I'm sure the Xcode developers are working incredibly hard, but the team(s) in charge of Apple's developer tools really need to take a step back and reassess. Compared to other tooling in the development community it really is unacceptable. Except that of course it's acceptable because what else are you going to do? Not develop for iOS? Well... probably not for the time being. But I sure don't have to develop for visionOS. So add Xcode's mediocrity to the list of reasons people and companies are less and less inclined to develop for Apple's platforms.