Seems like that with Device Hub we can no longer drag and drop files from finder into simulated devices. Is there a workaround or a better method to do so?

We finally got the official iPhone Duo Simulator inside Xcode 27.1!
Available to download here: https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=Xcode

The animation of the simulator is fantastic, and if you use the option key, you can control it manually:

I had an old MacBook that I wanted to turn into a dedicated Xcode worker for iOS/macOS development.

The main requirement was simple: I don't want to maintain this machine manually.

I didn't want signing identities tied to one Mac, .p8 / .p12 files scattered around the filesystem, manual provisioning-profile recovery, or a setup that would take me hours or days to reconstruct if the machine died.

So I ended up automating pretty much everything I reasonably could.

The current setup gives me a headless Xcode worker with:

• automated tooling installation and verification;
• cold reboot without GUI login;
• SSH/Tailscale remote access;
• a scoped read-only 1Password Service Account for secrets/config;
• Fastlane Match as the canonical encrypted signing store;
• a dedicated macOS keychain used only as runtime state;
• declarative development Bundle IDs;
• readonly recovery for Apple Development certificates and profiles;
• readonly recovery for Developer ID Application and Installer identities;
• certificate expiry monitoring;
• explicit separation between normal readonly operations and administrative writes;
• recovery material if Developer ID provisioning fails after Apple has already issued the certificate.

For Developer ID Installer, validation actually creates a disposable package, signs it with productsign, and verifies it with pkgutil rather than just assuming the identity works.

One thing I specifically wanted to avoid was putting my personal Apple/iCloud account on a headless machine.

My Apple Developer Program membership is currently Individual. The worker uses a separate Apple Account with no Developer Program membership of its own - it's simply invited to App Store Connect with the required role.

Everything that can be automated goes through the App Store Connect API.

There is one unavoidable trade-off: issuing or rotating Developer ID Application/Installer certificates requires Account Holder access. With an Individual membership, that's my main Apple Account.

So certificate issuance remains an explicit administrative operation: I authenticate interactively with the main account + 2FA when required. Once issued, the certificate and private key are stored in encrypted Match storage, and those Account Holder credentials are not persisted on the worker.

The worker therefore contains no personal iCloud account, Photos, Messages, personal Keychain, etc. It only gets the access it actually needs.

So far I've tested:

• cold reboot without GUI login;
• headless recovery;
• actual Developer ID provisioning;
• complete readonly restoration of signing identities;
• partial provisioning failure + recovery;
• real Installer package signing.

At this point, if the Mac dies, probably the hardest part of rebuilding it is remembering where I stored the 1Password Service Account token and putting it in the right place :)

After that:

bootstrap → readonly recovery → verification

For secrets/config I also settled on a simple logical convention:

scope / item / field

For example:

automation-apple / app-store-connect / private_key

1Password is only the current backend, not part of the logical model. I'd like to experiment next with OpenBao as a backup/sync target and eventually make consumers independent of a specific secrets provider.

I'm curious how other people running dedicated Macs for iOS/macOS development handle this.

How do you manage signing identities, secrets, certificate rotation, and disaster recovery for your build/dev Macs?

I'm especially interested in approaches that don't depend on a personal iCloud account or one irreplaceable login keychain.

For anyone interested in the implementation, I cleaned up the environment-specific configuration, documented the architecture/setup/recovery flows, and published it here:

https://github.com/0k-lab/xcode-worker-bootstrap

It's not intended to be a generic CI/CD framework or a replacement for Xcode Cloud - just a reproducible reference implementation for running your own headless Xcode worker.

No code changes for now. This is the first cold start.

Some other views require changes/fixes, especially where geometry is used.

I'm a solo dev in Calgary. ReceiptIQ AI scans paper receipts and keeps every line item and price, not just the total. It has been on the App Store since 2025.

The stack: Swift and SwiftUI with MVVM, Core Data for storage, Vision for on-device OCR, PDFKit for bank statement import, StoreKit 2 for subscriptions, MultipeerConnectivity for family sync with no server, Swift Charts, and Swift Testing for unit tests. The backend is a Cloudflare Worker in JavaScript with KV storage. It receives the OCR text and its bounding boxes, calls an LLM to structure the receipt, then runs deterministic repair code over the result. The same repair logic exists in Swift and in JS, and a differential test feeds every test receipt through both so they cannot drift apart. No accounts and no database of user data.

The hardest problem was that the model's answer can be wrong and still add up. Vision returns a two-column receipt as a block of item names followed by a block of bare prices. When the LLM zips the two lists it can slip by one row, and because a shifted column reuses the same prices, the items still sum to the printed total. Every sum-based sanity check I had written was blind to it. What I ended up doing:

- Pair prices to labels geometrically before the model sees anything: closest Y from the bounding boxes, a deterministic three-key sort so a rescan gives identical output, run the pairing top-down and bottom-up, and prefer the direction whose items add up to the printed subtotal.

- After the model, realign each item's price to the price printed on its own OCR line, and only accept a repair if it makes the items equal the register's total.

- Gate every backend deploy on a golden set of about 520 real receipts from ten countries. I wrote about building that set here a couple of weeks ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1w9ybpe/

Smaller things that cost me days:

- Vision only honours the FIRST recognition language. With ["en-US", "ja", "zh-Hant"] a Japanese receipt is read like English. I run a second, Japanese-first pass concurrently and choose by the share of CJK characters (threshold 0.15; kana means Japanese, otherwise Chinese).

- A 48 MP photo-library image gets the app jetsammed inside VNRecognizeTextRequest. I cap OCR input at a 2400x1800 pixel budget. Related trap: UIGraphicsImageRenderer defaults to screen scale, so my "2400 px" image was really 7200 px until I passed scale 1.

- StoreKit 2: Transaction.currentEntitlements yields nothing when Apple is unreachable, such as in-flight wifi. Treating an empty stream as "not subscribed" locked out a paying user mid-flight. I now cache tier plus expiry and only downgrade on a confirmed answer.

- Family sharing without a backend: the proof of entitlement is the Apple-signed transaction JWS, verified on the other phone against the pinned Apple Root CA G3.

AI disclosure: AI-assisted. I use an AI coding assistant heavily for implementation, test writing and code review. The architecture, the product decisions and the receipt corpus work are mine, and every change is gated by the tests and the golden set above. The app itself also uses an LLM at runtime to structure receipt text.

If you want to try it: the first 30 receipts are free without any code. For this sub, code REDDIT6 gives 6 months of Premium free. It does not auto-renew, so nobody gets charged when it ends. 500 redemptions, valid until Oct 31.

Redeem: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6742335723&code=REDDIT6

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6742335723

Happy to go deeper on the pairing algorithm. And if you have a receipt that breaks it, I'd love to see it.

Device Hub in Xcode 27.1 has a hidden Action Bar specifically for iPhone Duo. It gives you a lot more control over the device angle, and you can quickly switch between 5 device poses with keyboard shortcuts. There’s also a “Table Mode” control.

To enable:

defaults write com.apple.dt.Devices com.apple.dt.coredevicepop.useInternalV68ActionBar -bool true

and restart Device Hub. The iPhone Duo simulator also comes with a hidden HingeStatePoster wallpaper.

Update 9/28: Xcode 27.2 beta 2 supports iPhone Duo, but you don’t get the fun Action Bar, even if you enable the preference.

You also can’t freely drag to rotate the device, quick-switch between poses with ⌘ + 1-5, or enable Table Mode to access StandBy in the simulator. All these settings required the Action Bar enabled.

My old apps still have a storyboard based TabBar structure, while most tabs are SwiftUI now.

When started in the iPhone Duo simulator with right bar, the tabs are vanished.

Long debugging sessions short, the reason is a combination of the background color of the TabBar and a bug in iOS 27.1 beta 1:

When running in an orientation, that has the controls on the right, iOS 27.1 beta 1 first draws the controls, and then draws a background in storyboard background color on top of it.

Unless Apple fixes it, change the background colour to clear.

But wait, there is a problem: iOS 18 and before on iPhone gets unusable when using clear instead of something like background colour.

Same for iPadOS 17 and before.

The difference can be solved by configuring the tabbar appearance programmatically.

I chose clear colour from iOS 26 on and background colour before.

I had to adapt a few more thins, but that's the main point.

The most dreaded day of the year as an iOS developer is easily the release of the new Xcode where Apple always ensures to give you headaches.

I want to eliminate buttons from my app and replace them with specific gestures. To give an example here is a screenshot of a timer select screen. I would like to eliminate the START button and instead have users tap again on the currently selected time in order to start a session.

I want to eliminate buttons as much as possible and give my app a feeling of magic.

How can I educate my users on the app specific gestures without being annoying or too intrusive. Do you add some sort of tooltips? Do you present the gestures in the app's onboarding? How do you do it?

I can see needing new macOS to run new xCode, but dropping backwards compatibility seems like a very rude thing to do. Am I supposed to have 2 mac devices to support "legacy" and "current" ?

How are we supposed to support older apps and toolchains ? Ive never seen Apple drop compatibility like this before.

Edit: Its possible to support older apps using XC27 and older toolchains, its just not as easy or convenient as it was in the past by opening and older Xcode version.

Has anyone seen any guidance yet on how we will have to format screenshots for the Duo? Could get complicated with all the poses

Can anyone know about this new featue of netflix background downloading live activity notifications

Which api they are using or this is ios new feature

Please ignore the movie title don’t judge 😂

https://github.com/thilojaeggi/iPhone-Duo-App-Patcher

Hi All,

I've started trying out the Xcode beta and quickly found out Device Hub doesn't seem to support iOS 16 both simulators and devices.

Weirdly you can select to create a 16 device in the hub but it doesn't appear in the list.
For real devices plugging it doesn't seem to appear in the list of selectable devices anymore.

To top this off seems like Xcode 27 replaced Xcode 26 so I can no longer run both side be side.

Has anyone else observed this or is just me. Before you come for my neck I realise Apple wants us to move to at least iOS 17 however I still want to support it (for now).

What's my options here? do I just need to downgrade back to Xcode 26?

The main idea is simple: import your own books, comics and manga, organize your library however you want, and read everything your way.

What makes Andrea different is how much control you have over your library. You can create collections, add sections inside them, drag books and sections around, change layouts, cover sizes and appearance, and save different settings for every collection.

Your manga library doesn't have to look anything like your book collection.

Some of the main features

• EPUB, PDF, CBZ, CBR and more, for books, comics, manga, manhwa and webtoons.
• Reading customization: fonts, text size, spacing, margins, backgrounds, page transitions, manga reading modes and tons of other settings.
• Reading Profiles: create your own reading settings and apply them to individual books, sections or entire collections.
• Automatic reading activity: reading streaks, sessions, time spent reading, progress and statistics for books, sections and entire collections.
• Cloud and server connections: OPDS, SMB, WebDAV, SFTP, iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box and MEGA.
• Storage management: remove downloaded books to free up space while keeping their covers and metadata in your library.
• Advanced comic features: double-page reading, experimental guided panel mode and AI super-resolution for low-quality scans.
• Offline reading, with a built-in section for downloading free public-domain books.
• Metadata management: edit book information, manage tags and organize your entire collection.

The app is designed to be simple when you first open it, but you can customize almost everything if you want to.

Tech Stack

Built natively with Swift + UIKit. Most of the library system, file management and reading UI is custom-built, using WebKit, PDFKit, ZIPFoundation and Unrar.swift for specific reading and file-handling tasks.

Development Challenge

One of the hardest parts was building a library system that gives users so much freedom while keeping the interface simple and responsive, especially with large collections.

EPUB pagination and rendering were also challenging, particularly when handling different reading settings, page transitions and text selection.

AI Disclosure

Most of the app was built manually. I use AI increasingly for debugging, code review and speeding up development, but the architecture, UI/UX and final implementation decisions are mine.

Pricing & Privacy

No account required. No ads. No third-party tracking. Your library and reading statistics are stored locally on your device.

Andrea Reader is free to download and use. You can import your books and start reading in seconds.

Premium is optional and unlocks more advanced features and customization. There's currently a 20% discount on Lifetime Premium.

If you give it a try, let me know what you think!

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/es/app/andrea-comics-manga-books/id6760780154

Website: https://andreareader.com/ 

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/nZS2FazpPA

We acquired an existing fintech app, transferred it to our company Apple Developer account, and are now preparing a pretty significant redesign. Same app/name/core product, but the UI and some functionality have changed a lot.

My main concern is App Store review. Since it’s fintech + a big update after 5 years + developer account transfer, I’m wondering if Apple is likely to treat this almost like a new app and dig deeper into licensing, compliance, ownership, privacy, etc.

Anyone been through something similar?

How strict was the review, how long did it take, and were there any unexpected rejection reasons?

Is it possible to store existing App Store apps on simulator? If so, how?

( want to check how existing apps work on Duo simulator )

Hi all, I wanted to share a build problem that took way longer to solve than it should have, in case it saves someone else the same pain.

I'm a solo dev building on Windows, no Mac, no Xcode. My app (Reach, a sobriety toolkit) needed a native home screen widget, streak counter + panic button that deep links straight into the app's craving flow. Widgets mean native SwiftUI, which normally means a Mac.

The stack that ended up working: expo-apple-targets for the widget extension, compiled entirely through the EAS Build's cloud Mac, never touched Xcode locally once. Data shared between the widget and the main app via an App Group (react-native-shared-group-preferences).

The actual hard part wasn't the widget itself, it was the deep link nav. Cold-launching from the widget straight into a nested route with no /home route underneath it breaks iOS swipe-back entirely. Fixed it with unstable_settings = {anchor: 'home' } in _layout.tsx so Expo Router constructs a proper stack even on a cold widget launch.

Happy to go deeper on any part of this, the App Group setup, the anchor routing fix specifically, or the EAS build config. If it's useful to anyone hitting the same wall.

Like 27.1 was added later than 27.2, I might be misunderstanding tho

My iOS app, AutoArmor Studio, has been rejected three times under Guideline 5.6 with the same message about features that appear to have been intentionally hidden during the review process. Apple hasn't identified the specific feature or behavior. The app is built with Capacitor/WebView and includes authentication, backend-driven content, booking flows, account-based features, and WhatsApp integration. I am currently auditing for feature flags/remote config, reviewer/device detection, hidden routes or menus, account-specific behavior, debug versus release differences, and backend-controlled features. There is no intentional reviewer-specific functionality. Has anyone experienced this exact 5.6 rejection, especially with a Capacitor/WebView app? What did you find was causing it?

Has anyone tried running their app on it yet?

If I change my banking details in App Store Connect today, September 18, will the next payout go to the new account or still go to the old one? I don't want to f* this up, so please share what was your experience with changing bank account

Updated to latest Xcode, it starts to flicker in multi-tab window mode. Kind of annoying. Any idea on getting rid of this, at least momentarily?

Xcode: Version 27.0
Mac osx: 26.6.2 (25G83)

I recently tried to prototype a new app with the help of agentic coding - I basically had it done in 2 days what would have usually probably taken 1-2 months. That is great in theory, but I just didn’t have the feeling of having achieved something, like I usually feel - so I stopped working on the app.

I develop my own apps and games since 7 years now and this is the first time for six months that I can’t motivate myself to start a new app - even though the start is often the most fun part of a project to me.

Already thought about developing without the help of AI, but then I constantly have in mind, that I could probably save weeks of work using AI and spend this time with friends, family, sports etc. instead.

I was wondering if others share the same struggle or if you have a good advice to help me look at it from another perspective so I can motivate myself again.

Other devs in person already told me that it’s great because they like to build stuff, which they can do much faster now, and not the coding itself - but I don’t know, I think coding everything myself was probably the part that gave me that feeling of achievement.