Apple doesn’t care. Look at how bad iTunes or iCloud or whatever is. Especially on windows. Their software is terrible. They focus mostly on what makes money. And the support is non existent. All you can do is shout in the forums but some Apple apologist will respond rudely or with some unhelpful generic tips that do nothing.
Some valid points, but the compiler isn't Xcode and Swift isn't able to check the expression. Imho in these cases it's the developers lack of insight into how SwiftUI works, but otoh Apple often doesn't help with obtaining the insight..
They will also silently stop supporting some piece of library you rely on, leave it broken in some way or another, and just leave you on your own.
However, it has its good sides. The profiling tools are great for example. And I would rather work on 10 difficult problems with Xcode than on 1 with Visual Studio..
Apple would have been avoided by developers if they weren't part of the smartphone duopoly. The tools and processes are just that bad.
Now Google has decided to make theirs even worse than Apple at least when it comes to publishing in the play store.
Apple has always been famously anti-developer. They write terrible documentation, too. You're supposed to suck up to them to get access to their precious users.
Everything in this article is a reason to stay away from everything proprietary about Apple development. If there is some software that can't be delivered with open web technology or an existing game engine, I'd like to know what it is.
Try developing on the Apple Watch. I think I have spent more time dealing with connection issues than writing actual code...
Could some Xcode uers explain to me why AppCode (IntelliJ IDE) did not take off as an Xcode replacement? I recently had to do some iOS work, knew that Xcode sucks, wanted to try AppCode, only to learn that it was discontinued because of lack of interest.
I am assuming this is the reason why frameworks like Flutter are eating the iOS App Market ? 30 % of ALL iOS apps are now developed in Flutter and that number is rising every quarter.
Maybe only a minority of iOS developers will be using SwiftUI and XCode within a few more years ?
Apple: would it kill you to add some labels to all the mystery-meat navigation in Xcode?
XCode is so bad I spent a solid year rewriting a perfectly functional iOS application (B2B) as a PWA using raw, vanilla javascript. Simply being able to use VS and AspNetCore meant my iteration time went from "what the fuck I'm done with computers" to about 3 seconds per. It was one of the best payoffs I've experienced with regard to vendor risk and complexity management. Being able to ignore the consequences of WWDC every year was such a relief. We weren't even trying to add any new features. We just wanted to keep it alive across major os versions.
iOS Safari was a landmine environment to navigate when attempting to shim the native features, but we eventually got 100% coverage. The worst part was 2D barcode scanning and getting the appropriate camera and resolution. After a few hundred hours we had something that was indistinguishable from native.
If you're a B2B vendor working with Apple tech, I would seriously consider the power of the open web. Breaking out of Apple tooling prison is like a 100x+ uplift in productivity if you have expert level familiarity in any other ecosystem.
The only time I use Xcode is when I accidentally click a random file and Xcode pops up. I close it immediately
As an iOS developer it is truly a bad piece of software. Compiler doesn't even throw an error when you left out a dot.
I don't develop for Apple platforms so I don't deal with Xcode (apparently thank god), but all of this reminds me of web development back in the early days of Internet Explorer. Until Mozilla/Opera/Safari/Chrome started taking market share did the development information/stability really start to drastically improve. I'm inferring that it's basically impossible to build tooling for Apple because it is all proprietary/undocumented, so their own tools have no competition. It blows my mind that you can't CI/CD builds on servers readily requiring people to setup weird mac mini server farms since the whole xserver line died years ago.
Ballmer's "developers developers developers" moment will forever be burned into my brain, but that wasn't wrong on a strategy level.
XCode evidently cannot keep pace with the rapid development of Swift. Instead of fully embracing community development, Apple maintains a proprietary (dated and divergent) fork of the Swift toolchain in Xcode. For example, check how different compiler diagnostics and suggestions are when using Xcode vs SourceKit LSP. Apple is, once again in its time-honored fashion, wasting collective effort because of its siloed, secrecy-laden development model.
Thank you for sharing this, now I feel less dumb. Recently I had the pain of publishing my app (Flutter/Dart) on the apple Appstore, admittedly, my first experience using a mac in the last 30 years so I don't speak mac at all, but like, I know computers right?... famous last words.
I thought I was "holding it wrong"... like really badly wrong! and all I was trying to do was clone my repo and compile it for the store, that's it. took me nights and nights to get over each subsequent hurdle and false peak and missing import and then at the end, oh please upgrade and start again.
Thank goodness I only need it for that 1 step and I can do everything else on computers and software that is normal for me. As a first time app maker, I've had a super experience with Flutter in VScode.
I gave up apple development after 2 years of paying developer fees. Vague errors, buttons that work 2nd time. but not the first time.
I got into apple development to publish a unity game to iDevice. To publish unity game to iDevice, you need a mac. You also need yearly apple developer membership. Where they make you jump through hoops which provides them entertainment. Just like you being an animal in a circus which they control.
I learnt apple doesn't care. Now I also don't care. (but yeah that got my money. I didn't get any money)
Microsoft DX has me spoiled.
It’s horrible but also kind of so good. The bugs are absolutely horrendous, swift is an abomination, the menus are completely impossible to figure out, the builds are wacky. But I’ll be damned, SwiftUI and the build and deploy process for iPhone apps is so straightforward if you can just paddle around the rocks.
Amen. I am thankful everyday that IntelliJ is used for Android Studio
That first error isn’t an Xcode issue. It’s a Swift compiler issue. And you can’t blame your IDE for your bad instincts—at some point those ritualistic fixes stopped being necessary and I haven’t had to do them for more than half a decade. You really should be digging into your code using breakpoints and logging to find the root cause.
I do think Xcode has very rough edges but if we’re criticizing it, we have to criticize the right points.
I had the same issue and thought it was just a skill issue on my part. It’s good to know that other developers are experiencing the same problems.
I also felt like I had to install the latest iOS emulators almost every week, and everything lagged on the 8GB RAM base model MacBook Air.
Thing is, I have stopped expecting Xcode to be any good.
Actual native macOS/iOS development got beaten senseless when the App Store made it clear that "unsustainably low" was the expected price point for third party developers; and that Apple were treating the store more or less as a market research exercise and good ideas absolutely would be stolen.
So it's an internal tool, really. And we're I-guess-lucky that they document it and release it for the proles.
That’s what monopoly looks like.
It's quite ok as a pure C/C++/ObjC IDE with the project files generated via cmake, but then, so is VSCode ;)
The integrated Metal debugger is actually quite spectacular, unfortunately that's countered by the CPU debugger being extremely bare bones and slow.
Strong words for someone who never used lotus notes.
(Didn't read the article, basing this on the subject alone)
I love my mac and I hate everything Microsoft, but just as Xcode may be the worst piece of software coming out of Apple, Visual Studio (no, not VSCode) may be the greatest piece of software coming out of Microsoft.
It is an amazing piece of engineering. It's not perfect, it has it's share of bugs and quirks, but still, it's a wonder to behold :D
Sorry, you're not trying hard enough to find bad cases of terrible professional software.
Besides, the article reads like a noob using xcode for the first time.
I remember a long time ago writing simple macos apps you could use from the command line.
The compile command was basically:
gcc -o foo foo.m -framework Foundation
Can you write Apple applications, desktop or mobile, entirely in Rust?
Is there any way to avoid Apple technologies (that isn't React native, and obviously you still need to build on a Mac) when developing software?
You can also have code completion with old CLion+Theos+Objective C, or with VSCode+SPM+xtool toolchains btw. It's not a great experience either but at least it did not force me to deal with macOS to start with.
Swift is actually a really good language let down by its official IDE. Slow build times, laggy autocomplete, random crashes etc. I can’t remember Xcode ever being great to use.
When Apple says "Jump", developers ask "How high?"
PL/SQL developer is the worst one I've ever used.
Honestly, the second to last paragraph reminded me a lot of my experience with eclipse back in 2011 to 2014. I think it was called the eclipse dance back than. A random order of clearing the cache, rebuilding, disabling/enabling plugins, creating a new workspace and restarting the ide would solve most problems. It is one of the reasons I developed a disdain for eclipse. I later even switched jobs mostly to get away from it.
He or she forgot all the gems about the xcode garbage randomly losing contact with ios devices and the random thrashing you use to attempt to reconnect. It's particularly galling since all my ios devices aren't even used: they're test devices only. So they're completely stock and solely run my app.
Vivado: hold my beer
As an infrequent user of iMovie (and a past user of Xcode), I think that iMovie really gives Xcode a run for its money in bad UX. How that app got out of the lab like that is profoundly beyond my understanding. It’s not just bugs as such, but actively user-hostile as though a team of people really worked hard with the goal to make the most infuriatingly inconsistent and unintuitive app imaginable.
this is very disappointing considering that the spiritual ancestor ProjectBuilder/InterfaceBuilder from NeXT was considered amazing and ahead of its time. Apparently after NeXT joined Apple, ProjectBuilder was rewritten from scratch. maybe that's where the problems started...
Yeah it feels like a 90s C++ IDE
I guess that means you're young.
wait until you try Android Studio...
I was going to defend Xcode and say it's not that bad... but then I read the article and realised that I have just become so accustomed to these problems that I don't consciously realise the daily hellfire that I experience.
Even when you think you're immune to it, Stockholm syndrome is real.
A similar article I wrote on the 'Dark Side' of Apple Development, brings up many additional issues:
https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/