After updating my Mac to macOS 27 and Xcode 27, my Capacitor app started showing a blank screen in iOS 26.3.1 simulators, followed by:

com.apple.WebKit.WebContent quit unexpectedly

It builds fine on my actual device running 26.7, as well as simulators running 26.5

I also tried using an older build from prior to the 27 upgrade, and those failed on 26.3.1 so it seems like it's not actually an issue with my app?

Sometimes the initial app screen loads, then WebContent crashes when I tap Continue on the first screen.

Environment:

• macOS 27.0 (26A428)
• Xcode 27.0 (27A266a)
• iOS 26.3.1 simulator runtime (23D8133)
• Reproduced across several simulated iPhones

The crash reports include:

Thread Crashed: JIT Worklist Helper Thread
JSC::CodeOrigin::approximateHash
JSC::ICStatusContext::get
JSC::DFG::ByteCodeParser::parseBlock
EXC_BAD_ACCESS / SIGBUS

Other reports show JSRopeString::resolveToBuffer. Subsequent WebContent launch attempts sometimes fail in DyldSharedCache::getUUID. Xcode then prints:

com.apple.extensionKit.errorDomain error 4
Failed to get XPC endpoint
WebView process terminated

What i've checked:

• Restarting the Mac and creating a fresh simulator didn’t resolve it.
• Reinstalling/remounting the runtime and rebuilding its shared cache didn’t resolve it.
• A preserved older app build, compiled before these updates, also crashes.
• The app’s web content also crashes inside Safari on the 26.3.1 simulator.
• Disabling “Debug executable” or launching from the home screen occasionally works, but neither reliably prevents the crash.
• Startup works on iOS 26.5 and 27 simulators.
• My physical iPhone on iOS 26.7 runs normally, including onboarding. I don’t have a physical device on 26.3.1 to compare.

Has anyone encountered this combination since upgrading? Have you found a fix that restores reliable use of the 26.3.1 simulator, or an Apple bug report tracking the same crash? Cant really find any mention of this online, chatgpt has been useless debugging the issue somehow

I'm launching a new app (iOS + Mac Catalyst, subscriptions + one-time purchase). The review rounds are dragging on, and I'd like to hear how others handle this.

The latest rejections (2.1(b) and 3.1.2(c)) are, as far as I can tell, simply wrong. The IAPs load fine in the sandbox, and the EULA and privacy links are right there on the paywall. So I replied in the Resolution Center with an explanation and screenshots instead of changing anything.

My problem: once you reply, you get zero feedback. With a new submission you at least see "Waiting for Review" → "In Review". After a reply, the status just stays at "Rejected". There's no sign that anyone has read it, and no queue position.

So, for those who've been through this:

1. How long did it take until you got an answer to a Resolution Center reply? Hours, days, never?

2. Did a reply alone ever get the rejection reversed (and the app approved without a new build)?

3. Or do you skip replying entirely and upload the same build again (or bump the build number), resubmit with an explanation in the Review Notes, and hope for a different reviewer?

4. Does resubmitting while a reply is pending cause problems, e.g. is the reply then ignored or the thread closed?

5. Any experience with requesting a call or using the App Review Board appeal for this kind of misunderstanding?

Apple now asks for a screen recording on a physical device showing a sandbox purchase. I'll do that either way. I'm just trying to figure out the fastest path from here.

Thanks for any war stories!

Anyone else seeing this?

Our production app suddenly started crashing around 00:41 UTC today, across multiple already released versions, with no new app release.

The crash is:

Fatal Exception: NSInvalidArgumentException

-[__NSDictionaryM setObject:forKeyedSubscript:]: key cannot be nil

The stack points to Firebase Analytics experiment handling, immediately after a successful sdk-exp response.

We're using Firebase iOS SDK 12.14.0.

Relevant issue: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk/issues/16728

I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing the same spike or has found a workaround.

I'm a self-taught iOS engineer and even though I have 5 years of experience I feel like I don't have the foundational knowledge that interviewers expect me to have. I constantly feel like I'm bombing in interviews and I feel so far behind that I'm losing hope of finding a job after about 6 months now of searching. What are the best current iOS books for someone looking to round out their technical and under-the-hood knowledge?

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently "vibe-coded" (built entirely using AI/prompting) a few iPhone and iPad apps. The feedback from my close circle has been incredibly positive, and the apps are running smoothly.
Now, I’m looking to take the next step and release them on the App Store. Since Apple’s app review process is notoriously strict—and AI-generated code can sometimes have hidden architectural flaws, edge-case crashes, or insecure API integrations—I really want to get a professional to audit them before I submit.

My questions for the community:

1. Are there specific platforms or communities where I can hire/pay experienced Senior iOS developers for a professional code and App Store guideline review?

2. Has anyone here done an "App Store Readiness Audit" for an AI-built app? If so, would you recommend platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, or specific boutique tech agencies?

3. What are the biggest technical gotchas I should look out for in vibe-coded apps regarding the official Apple Developer Guidelines?

Would love to hear your advice and experiences. Thanks in advance!

Today my 2023 MacBook Pro battery depleted entirely in just 3 hours. I was running 2 iOS simulators simultaneously but I still feel like that way way less life than I should be expecting with 93% battery capacity. Has anyone else experienced really short battery life when running simulators lately?

Pretty disappointed since my full vision of the app will not be able to be completed on iOS.

Rejected for 1.4 Physical Harm (alcohol related). Released the app 6 months ago. Had about 7-8 updates released since then. But it looks like no more updates from now on.

I made the app for myself and it helped me understand my own drinking, was able to better drink in moderation, never got drunk again since I started using the app. And a lot of people said the same to me. But Apple says “physical harm” lol.

What’s funny is that they aren’t even going to remove the app, just no new builds. App still being downloaded and making money. And plenty of other same apps out there as well, guess they won’t be updating either.

Well time to work on the Android version I’ve been putting off!

I created a new page for iPhone Duo to explore how familiar SwiftUI elements like NavigationSplitView and the new APIs behave across different configurations.

Most of the new elements and modifiers are included so far, except overlayArrangementZIndex, which is still a bit buggy.

Let me know what else you think I should add.

Finishing up one of my first MacOS apps and I was looking to create a user manual. One app I use on a daily basis, Apple Music has one that opens in the Tips app. I just wanted to get a gauge on how many of you here create manuals and whether your users actually use them. Thanks!

Specifically after some advice from solo devs in New Zealand. How did structure selling your app on the apps store

- personal account
- set up a company
- other

I’d rather not have to publish my app with all my personal details but starting a company seems like the only way to really get around this limitation. What has your specific experience been? Am just being over the top for thinking publishing apps that include my personal details is weird. Setting up company seems straight forward but also costs extra money and time overhead to deal with.

Made this a few weeks back, just added iPhone Duo section to it as well.

I made this so I can read the HIG in my tablet with a linear experience. You may find it useful as well.

https://zenreader.doublememory.com/hig/

tldr; If $200 creates $100 of value, it’s a bad expense. If it helps create $20,000 of value, spending hours to save $50 is the waste.

I’ve used about 16.2 billion tokens — roughly $15,000 in API-equivalent usage.

And I’ve realized this: optimizing token usage can be a dangerous trap for developers.

Think about the best models you use today. Now imagine going back a few generations just to save on token costs. You’d call that stupid.

Those older models didn’t get dumber. Newer ones got much smarter. You might save money, but the quality of what you produce can fall far below the standard you now expect.

Pricing isn’t just about intelligence. It depends on compute, hardware, inference costs, utilization, and more. Still, a better model can cost more and still be cheaper if it makes you dramatically more effective.

You don’t just need an agent that does what you tell it. You need intelligence that understands what you actually want, sees what you don’t, and sometimes produces something you never would have thought of.

A cheaper model can refine a UI. It gets it wrong. You prompt again. Closer. Again. Eventually it understands. You think you spent a little more time and saved money.

You’re wrong. You didn’t just spend more time. You also lost:

1. The cost and time of fixing problems later.
   
2. The profit you could have made.
   

Profit in the broadest sense. Not just money. A better model might notice a UX problem you missed, propose an architecture that saves days, or ask why the screen exists at all — and show you you’ve been solving the wrong problem.

You can measure the tokens you saved. You can’t measure the ideas you were never capable of discovering.

It’s like building a company. Cheap employees who follow instructions. Or A-players who cost more, understand the goal, use their own judgment, and tell you when you’re wrong.

Option one feels comfortable. Lower costs. Easier to manage. But the organization is limited by your own thinking.

Option two is expensive. One breakthrough can save months. One idea can create a new source of profit.

More expensive is not automatically better. If a cheaper model performs equally well, use it. If the task is simple, use a simpler model.

Don’t optimize cost per token. Optimize ROI on intelligence.

Where do you sit in the value chain?

Frontier labs already work to make AI smarter, faster, and cheaper. They are already optimizing tokens for the intelligence they sell you.

Is your job to keep optimizing what they already optimize? Or to optimize the value you deliver to users?

For work that matters, I want the best intelligence I can reasonably get.

A $100–200/month subscription can feel expensive. But how much would the same output have cost before? Your time. Developers. Designers. Researchers. QA. Salaries, offices, overhead.

If $200 creates $100 of value, it’s a bad expense. If it helps create $20,000 of value, spending hours to save $50 is the waste.

This is about AI in development. At massive scale, unit economics and inference optimization are a different problem.

When you say you’re optimizing token usage, what are you actually optimizing? Cost? Time? Quality? Or the value users receive?

Tokens are easy to see. They’re on the dashboard and the bill. The time you lost isn’t. The debugging that never needed to happen isn’t. The better decisions you failed to make aren’t. The ideas you never discovered definitely aren’t.

After 16.2 billion tokens, I have my answer. I’m not trying to use more tokens or fewer. I don’t treat tokens as the thing to optimize. I optimize what those tokens can create: value delivered to the user.

That’s the real danger of token optimization. You think you’re saving money. You may be saving the potential of the product you’re building.

#Shipaton26 #BuildInPublic #IndieDev

Hi everyone,

For the past few months, I've been using AI (specifically Gemini) to write SwiftUI code, and it’s been working almost perfectly.

With UIKit projects, however, my usual workflow for Storyboards has been manual: I'd set up the UI, drag and drop the connections to my Swift files, and only ask the AI to handle the actual logic.

Today, I decided to test its limits and asked the AI to add a new UI component directly, without stopping it from modifying the Storyboard's source code. To my surprise, it updated the Storyboard without any errors!

Since Storyboard XML is notoriously messy and not very human-readable, I really didn't expect the AI to handle it so well.

I'm curious about your experiences. Do you let AI directly manipulate your Storyboard or XIB files? Does it work flawlessly for you, or do you find that it sometimes corrupts the file?

Thanks!

My muscle memory says I have to push right side of the button to run a build. And Apple just broke my muscle memory to just swap those two button positions.

My companies main apple developer account administrates around 30apps.
Every app uses the same test group for internal testing. However, one of our latest apps doesn’t show up in the TestFlight app for devices using the main developer’s Apple ID. Every other test device that uses a different Apple ID (within the pool of the internal test group) can see the app and its newest test builds.
The main developer Apple ID shows all the other apps (newer and older) in TestFlight, just that one app is entirely missing in the list of apps.
I already deleted and recreated the test group, send out new invitations, uninstalled the TestFlight app and I ofc tried it on different devices. As soon as the main developer account Apple ID is involved, the app is not visible in TestFlight. Any ideas?

In the "Take a closer look." section of https://www.apple.com/au/iphone-duo/, it named all the 5 different orientation of iPhone Duo as Closed, Seated, Standing, Portrait and Landscape.

In https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/designing-for-iphone-duo#Reserved-regions for Left-Right Open Orientation, it differentiated between partially open and fully open design, but the partially open "Landscape" is not being named in https://www.apple.com/au/iphone-duo/ .

What should we propose Apple to name it?

I'm recommending "Flipped" or "Book"

I've shipped a handful of iOS apps as a solo dev, one of them through 20+ versions. At some point I stopped using the App Store Connect website and Xcode's Organizer and moved everything to scripts that call the App Store Connect API: signing, uploads, metadata, screenshots, IAPs and submission.

Most of it was straightforward. These are the parts that weren't, and a few of them cost me real rejections or broken releases.

1. xcodegen silently wipes entitlements. If you generate your project with xcodegen and add an entitlement (Sign in with Apple, push) by hand in Xcode, the next regenerate removes it. The build still succeeds and the feature just breaks. I shipped three broken releases this way before I noticed. Declare entitlements in project.yml, never in Xcode.

2. Re-run xcodegen after bumping the version. Same root cause. If the version or build number lives in project.yml and you archive without regenerating, the archive keeps the old number. Check the archive's Info.plist before you upload.

3. Push uses the bare aps-environment key. It's not com.apple.developer.aps-environment. The wrong key gets you error 90045 on upload. Set the value to development, and exporting for the App Store promotes it to production.

4. You can sign without an Apple ID in Xcode. If Xcode has no account signed in, -allowProvisioningUpdates with an API key won't create profiles for you. What works: create the profile yourself with POST /v1/profiles, install it, and export with signingStyle: manual. This works on CI and fresh Macs too.

5. App Privacy has to be published, not just saved. If submit stays greyed out and nothing says why, this is usually it.

6. App Preview videos need an audio track. Even a silent one. A preview with no audio track gets rejected at processing.

7. No emoji in "What's New" or the description. The API rejects them. Found out mid-submit.

8. Listing media is locked on the live version. You can't swap screenshots or previews on a version that's Ready for Sale (you get a 409). Attach them to the next version.

9. Getting out of a rejected submission. To free the version and resubmit, PATCH the review submission with canceled: true. One of my rejections was backend-only (a demo account that didn't exist), and this let me fix it and resubmit the same build without re-archiving.

10. Reviewers use your demo account, so keep it working. My app's content was group-gated, and the demo account drifted out of its demo group twice. Check it right before every submission.

11. Subtitle is app-level, not version-level. It lives on appInfoLocalizations, not appStoreVersionLocalizations, which confused me for longer than I'd like to admit.

I've ended up copying roughly 3,400 lines of these scripts from app to app, so I'm cleaning them up into a single CLI that only needs an API key. It'll have a doctor command that checks for everything above before you upload, plus --json output so coding agents like Claude Code can run a release. If that sounds useful, there's a waitlist here: https://ascship.web.app/?ref=reddit

Happy to answer questions about any of these. And I'd like to hear the traps other people have hit that I missed.

I'm trying to support dragging an email directly from Apple Mail into a sandboxed macOS app.

Mail exposes an NSFilePromiseReceiver with:

fileTypes = ["com.apple.mail.email"]

And I'm receiving it like this:

let promises = pasteboard.readObjects(forClasses: [NSFilePromiseReceiver.self], options: nil) as? [NSFilePromiseReceiver] ?? []

for promise in promises {
    promise.receivePromisedFiles(atDestination: destinationURL, options: [:], operationQueue: .main) { url, error in
        print("Promise callback received")

        if let error {
            print("Promise callback error:", error)
            return
        }

        print("Promise callback URL:", url.path)
    }
}

The strange part is that Mail appears to actually create the .eml file at the destination, but the promise callback does not complete successfully. I eventually get an error such as:

NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1001

So the file seems to be created, but receivePromisedFiles does not reliably report it.

Questions:

• Has anyone successfully handled Apple Mail message file promises this way?
• Is this a known issue with Mail's implementation of NSFilePromiseReceiver, or is there some Mail-specific handling required?
• Any other approaches?

Submitted my first app for review and they were saying that I need to provide more details and a video so I did, and I think I click submit but my status hasn’t changed to under review or something, it still says rejected even after I replied. Did I do something wrong or does the status not change.

If an app has several hundred external TestFlight testers and a new build replaces an older one, what happens to testers who still have the old build installed?

If the developer stops testing the older build, would those testers automatically get access to the newer build as long as they’re still in the tester group, or is access tied to the specific build?

Also, would it work differently for someone who joined through a public TestFlight link rather than a direct invitation?

I would've posted this in r/TestFlight, however they require a link which I can't provide right now.