Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode | Hacker News Reader

Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

scottwillsey.com

555 pointsspeckx232 comments

One down-side to this is that it does require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox. I do this too and there are lots of problems I can't solve in a sandbox. I know a lot of you are throwing your hands up at the years of security practices we're throwing out the window when we do that.

The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my choices here.

Generally, I don't worry about my machine being "blown up". I don't have a TON of unreproducible stuff on my machine. Everything is backed up, committed to git, and the like. I can restore most of it in a couple hours.

That said, I really, really don't want my .SSH directory sent to an AI agent and it's silly to prompt your way around that. You need to block it at the system level. I'm considering a separate user and then 700 permissions on my home directory.

I feel like we're back to 1990's security here. The double-edged sword is that it's helping us get things done at a pace like never before.

I'm not throwing shade here, I'm among the guilty.

You could move your SSH keys onto a password encrypted usb drive that you physically remove from the computer.

An alternative is to use ssh keys stored in the Secure Enclave with tools like https://secretive.dev/

Seems to me a tool like that would stop the agent from sending those specific keys elsewhere. But a tool like that would not stop the agent who is acting as you from using the SSH keys via the CLI. You would want to combine that with other tactics like having the agent run as some other user.

Secretive (and the similar built-in functionality [1]) both allow you to require TouchID too. I found an okay balance using two SSH keys: one for commit signing (w/o TouchID) and one for everything else (requires TouchID, or PIN on Linux)

So, the actions that I really don't want the agent to take (establishing an SSH connection, pushing to a git remote) always require my manual intervention.

[1] https://gist.github.com/arianvp/5f59f1783e3eaf1a2d4cd8e952bb...

... you're getting the agent to sign commits for you without manual intervention?

Yeah. The agent can create commits and those commits are signed (`commit.gpgsign true`).

I'm treating it like...you can hold me accountable for that commit and the commit came from my computer. That feels like the right spirit of things.

How do you do commit signing? I've never worked anywhere it was common, nor worked on a team where anyone else signed commits. I don't know how it's really used in the wild, so to speak.

> I don't know how it's really used in the wild, so to speak.

Commit signing primarily exists because linux kernel development happens via email, which isn't a secure channel.

In that context, signing is used to prove provenance; a commit signed by someone with merge rights gets included, and if you repeatedly sign bad code you'll have your right to merge revoked.

> you can hold me accountable for that commit

I wouldn't personally want to be held accountable for a commit I'd never so much as read, so I would never sign (even locally) a commit until I'd looked at it.

Makes sense, thanks for that context. I knew that linux kernel dev happens over email, but didn't piece that together with commit signing.

> I wouldn't personally want to be held accountable for a commit I'd never so much as read, so I would never sign (even locally) a commit until I'd looked at it.

I think that's reasonable. I'd say that if I push the commit, then I should be accountable for it whether I read it or not (and no one is going to see it unless I push it).

On a Mac. Just get a Mac mini. It doesn't have to be a crazy big beefy one, and if you're selling apps, it's a justifiable business expense.

I've been working on a wrapper harness that runs claude as a separate user named `agent`. I tried this about a year ago and couldn't get it to work because of OAuth and the keychain, but took another pass recently and claude had enough self-knowledge about recent changes to say we could do it with CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN. It has required building a some tooling around permissions setup with ACLs but it works on macOS today.

In terms of risk, I see it as halfway between stock claude with the sandbox and full-blown container or machine isolation.

I was recently thinking that as Claude's own sandbox gets better I'm doubting the ROI on my belt-and-suspenders project, but your comment reminds me why I'm doing it.

It is not currently published open source but I'm happy to talk about it with strangers.

Your sandbox can be a separate Mac user account.

You can also use native Mac VMs.

Many people have created Mac VM projects to do exactly this, I was working on one but was stalled too often because before I started using claude I bought a new laptop with what I KNEW was enough disk space.

The 100 GB or so I need to comfortably do the VM stuff just isn't available on my mac.

I've been running my agents in a docker sandbox that automatically mounts the current directory. It's been a bit of a pain to figure out and maintain the set of tools I provision into the sandbox- but it's fun to watch codex go to the ends of the earth trying to figure out solutions using nodejs (the only runtime).

okay but that doesn't help a single bit with the OPs point. Your xcode tools do not run inside a docker container

> require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox

You don't have to! All recent Macs come with nearly zero perf cost virtualization. You can easily run Mac or Linux VMs assuming same architecture. Use it all the time for development and whatever.

Use Tart [1] or VirtualBuddy [2], both open-source, for a packaged solution. Or in the spirit of this post, vibe code your own wrapper around the OS API [3]

More recently, there are also Apple containers [4]

[1] https://tart.run/

[2] https://github.com/insidegui/VirtualBuddy

[3] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization

[4] https://github.com/apple/container

>> I feel like we're back to 1990's security here.

> vibe code your own wrapper around the OS API

Maybe stick with one of the existing projects? Throwing out all of the edge cases and hardening that went into a security-related project just to burn a bunch of resources to generate a worse one you have to maintain yourself is 90s-level security with 2026-level inefficiency, IMO.

Of course, if you're not comfortable with reading or designing code, or don't feel like tinkering, you can use an existing project and they work great

But it is to note that the OS APIs do the heavy lifting, the projects are just wrappers

Generally, assuming an RYO solution is a reasonable first approach is is a trap beginners fall into.

Strong StackOverflow "don't do anything new, god forbid you may actually learn something" vibes

On "Hacker" News of all places :)

> don't do anything new, god forbid you may actually learn something

> vibe code your own wrapper around the OS API

In fact, I suggest reviewing the documentation to assess your own level:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

If the below sounds too complex to work with, can review more basics first. Can start with a Swift tutorial

  virtualMachine.start(completionHandler: { (result) in
      if case let .failure(error) = result {
           fatalError("Virtual machine failed to start with \(error)")
      }
  })

Strong “I’ve never had to deal with serious security problems stemming from a weird edge case, so this all seems silly to me” vibes.

RYO is the best way to learn, if you have the time to learn. After building one own solution one is able to assess the strengths and weaknesses of what other more experienced people built. Without the learning phase those other solutions are incomprehensible black boxes. The trick is not to skip the phase in which one researches available solutions.

> RYO is the best way to learn, if you have the time to learn

The problem is that nowadays, people roll their own solution, don’t take the time to learn (somewhat understandably, given the complexity of today’s stuff. You simply cannot learn all details about your hardware, OS, and third-party libraries anymore) but immediately deploy things in production.

Eating your own dog food can be good, but for security related stuff, it can easily be disastrous.

Honest question: is there anyone truly good at security who never made a potentially-disastrous dogfooding mistake while learning?

Not to decent mistakes or amateur brain surgery, but there has to be some level of risk tolerance among tinkerers.

Developing software that has the sole purpose of preventing something dangerous from happening is exactly when people should strive to be engineers, not tinkerers. Beginners often don’t know the difference.

Learning as you go is great if you’re not basing your core development workflow or data integrity on it.

all community projects (specially the ones maintained or opensourced by model owners) will certainly have the security-convenience trade offs set all the way to convenience while advertising all the (off by default) security features

Setting the convenience knob to very convenient in a system that has a lot more eyeballs on it will always be better than having something that one person who, let’s be real, probably doesn’t even have journeyman-level coding skills, estimates to be very secure based on what the model told them and a quick-skim code review.

It’s also a hell of an indictment of this community. FreeBSD is a community project. Qubes is a community project. SELinux is a community project. And people wonder why developers don’t take vibe coders seriously.

"Apple Containers"

I love how people say this like Apple finally created a native solution...

They didn't. It's just a linux vm running normal docker engine.

How else do you want people to refer to Apple’s tool called container?

> It's just a linux vm running normal docker engine

OCI compatible, but not docker

https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...

Actually makes use of Virtualization.framework mentioned above.

Does anyone actually use one of those for iOS development?

Linux VMs are not relevant here. For downloading Xcode and building apps, I believe one needs to sign in with their Apple account.

Does this work well with a macOS VM?

Yes! That is arguably the killer feature. You can virtualize macOS in macOS with (nearly) native speed and this is officially supported. Heck, even can run multiple of them at the same time.

See docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vir...

And projects like Tart, VirtualBuddy, etc. provide convenient wrappers for these APIs.

The limit is two. You are not allowed to run more than two macOS VMs. Also Tart VMs have problems with signing into icloud and other things that need a real secureID enclave.

I run my AI headless in a docker container and give it access to git – it can only contribute code - when it needs a secret I put it in a docker container in vault. when it needs infra, it makes me a jira ticket. that's my workflow.

This is more challenging for macOS.

I've been doing it just fine on macOS for awhile now. What's challenging about it?

I think particularly for iOS development. I was all in on sandboxed approaches...until I went to build an app, and now unfortunately convenience won

A question, how are you or anyone else doing this is registering bundle identifiers without opening xcode?

fastlane

They should’ve expected that using xAI

Use Secretive so your ssh keys are stored in the secure enclave. Keeping private keys in files is the 1990s security…

Genuine question: if the LLM possesses the ability to use Secretive to retrieve secrets are you not back to square 1? I'm not familiar with Secretive but if it's just another way to store secrets that's not enough. For proper security the LLM needs a black box intermediary to do anything privileged. I don't know what that looks like in terms of software.

Or better yet it needs dead-end privileges with a system and data that doesn't matter.

They keys are stored in the secure enclave. You can't get them out. You can only let the secure enclave make calculations with it. And it needs your fingerprint to unlock.

Akamai akr should be able to do something similar, but would store the private key on your phone. It's the successor of krypton, which was bought by Akamai, and I liked that even more as you really need a second device.

There's a spectrum between a restrictive sandbox and full YOLO mode, may 2025 style.

You can have something like Claude's auto approvals. You can poke specific holes in the sandbox (E.G. my Codex one can write to ~/go, ~/.cache and ~/.cargo). You can have explicit deny rules that hard-deny and bypass the sandbox and auto-approval. You can allow certain commands to bypass sandbox execution entirely.

While those aren't secure in theory (if you let a third party type prompts into the agent, they will likely be able to exfiltrate your data), they're secure against agent carelessness and AI stupidity in practice.

Well you can use Apple Containers - more convenient than Docker. Alternatively: I am not enthusiastic about Anthropic as a company but I use Claude Code with the three best open coding models (for low cost and speed) and opus when I need it: if you configure Claude Code correctly you protect !/.ssh, etc. I would rather use OpenCode but I am more comfortable with CC (and of course turn off telemetry).

re: this article: excellent! I always do about 90% of my Swift dev on the command line and I learned new tricks from the article. Bookmarked.

I've been building and testing my iOS app just for fun via Linux only.

Surprisingly, it's very easy. This works like a charm: https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool

You do not need to upload to TestFlight or the App Store; you can just install the app locally to your iPhone via usb -- even from Linux!

When in doubt, just ask your coding agent of choice to help you create and upload a Hello World iOS app. It's really easy.

I’ve been doing the same except that my linux installation is via WSL on Windows. I’ve been using sideloadly to move my IPA over to my phone. Works great.

Does the iPhone need to remain tethered if it is transferred via USB?

Dev apps need to be re-loaded every week (or two?) last time I did sideloading. The idea behind a dev app, in Apple's mind, is that it is for limited testing, so they have an expiration when not signed/installed through the App store.

That is specifically for apps installed with a personal signing certificate, when you haven't paid for a developer account. If you pay the $99 program fee, you get 365 days of validity.

Do the coding agents know about this tool?

just link it?

“Just link it” is like telling an intern to “use this program”. It will take a while (and each LLM user will burn tokens while learning).

This is the perfect use case for a skill: one person takes the hit to create the skill and then anyone else who wants the tool can use the skill.

Woah thanks for sharing will have to check this out.

I'm not an ios developer so forgive me...

So you can develop ios apps, run it on a real iphone that is activated without going through app store as a native app? But, you have to reinstall it every week?

Yes, but you have to reinstall every week unless you have a paid developer account.

If it's okay to mention my own complementary open source project, Axiom¹ does a good job of helping coding harnesses know how to do this effectively for Apple OS development.

In addition to a deep roster of skills and agencts, Axiom includes several for-LLM tools². xclog, xcprof, xcsym, and xcui are designed to be used by LLMs, and expose capabilities in a token-efficient way. These tools are equally helpful for non-Axiom skills/agents.

¹ Axiom: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ ² Axiom CLI tools: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/tools/

Axiom is excellent, thanks for making it!

I'm glad that it's been valuable for you!

will it work with flutter ?

Axiom covers only native APIs and tools, but the Flutter team maintains what looks like a nice set of skills at https://github.com/flutter/agent-plugins, and the Dart team at https://github.com/dart-lang/skills.

Silly question, but do you reckon it'll function decently in a Kotlin multiplatform codebase? There's swift native code, but I'm not sure how it would perform with some logic being shared.

Not silly at all. For Compose Multiplatform, Axiom won't do much for code review or generation. It might be useful for operations on the built app: console capture, crash symbolication, simulator UI/accessibility driving, CPU profiling, plus the whole shipping layer (signing, privacy manifests, submission).

Use axiom all the time thanks for your work. The next frontier in iOS app tooling is self-hostable Linux based build server. Thoughts?

Sounds very intriguing! Please reach out (see my profile) when you're ready to share more.

It's kind of funny to be reading this:

> I had Claude Code create mine: I told Claude, more or less: I want to archive, Developer ID-sign, notarize, staple, and install this app to /Applications without ever opening Xcode. Write me a script that does the whole chain and fails loudly if any step breaks.

Even though the text we're reading is Claude talking to us as well :)

Also it was weird to see the mention of "ask your LLM" at almost every stage in the blog post:

> point Claude Code or your LLM coding tool of choice to this blog post, and let it figure it out

> When in doubt, ask your LLM of choice about them and have it help you get set up. It’s the one that’s going to be using Xcode for you anyway.

> The whole point of using the LLM in the first place is to avoid doing things manually that you don’t want to do.

> Again, if in doubt, ask Claude Code or your LLM of choice to create this for you.

> Again, this is why you talk to your LLM, tell it what you want, and have it help build your workflow.

Claude telling us to point Claude to a web site written by Claude so that we can use Claude to create a build environment...

yo dawg

I heard you liked Claude, so I put extra Claude in your Claude so you can do more Claude.

I suppose it's easier to turn everyone into unwitting tokenmaxxers than it is to raise prices again.

Claudius Claudianus (aka Claudian)

… that Claude can use, because Claude can’t use the XCode gui very efficiently.

"Claude was the only LLM to survive the LLM Wars."

I wrote the post myself. But thanks for assuming. :)

The mistakes in the text made me doubt it was AI, but who knows, maybe it's doing that on purpose now

It seems too concise to be AI. My (conscious) heuristic for AI writing is how much context is squeezed into a sentence. LLMs seem to be pretty bad at the kind of elegant compression of meaning humans can do when they have done a lot of writing practice.

If I had to guess, I would say this is the human summarised conversation(s) with a bot.

It wasn't Ai. It was me. I wrote it.

Sorry if my speculation was bad! When I wrote it I meant it as a compliment. Raw LLM output is awful and really needs a human to "translate" the useful content to something worth reading.

1) tell me what they were then, 2) It wasn't AI. It was me

Claude didn't write this post. I did.

Like we need another reason not to write and publish!

"This is the part where you think/learn" and "this is the part where you just let the LLM figure it out" is a fine format for advice nowadays I think.

I am getting a little tired of every single HN comment being about how the linked article is written by an LLM.

> Even though the text we're reading is Claude talking to us as well :)

I'm not getting that vibe from this one; I'd bet money on it at least being substantially human edited. What are the tells you're seeing?

Technically, you are using Xcode.

Xcode is a [buggy as hell] GUI wrapper for a lot of system-level UNIX utilities and apps [which are generally, not so buggy].

Using CLI to release apps is a pretty old practice; at least as long as I've been doing it (I released my first Xcode app in 2012).

That's good to hear. I never even tried to make anything for macOS because I opened Xcode and.. well, you know.

Nah. I usually use Xcode GUI, but there's been a lot of discussion about using a CLI workflow, for many years. Should be easy to find.

Hope you like long argument lists. xcodebuild has a crazy long parameter list.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/xcode-comman...

From my experience the CLI works but is not well documented.

They rely on manpages, but using CLI tools is old enough, that there’s been plenty of online discussion on the practice.

LLMs will often use CLI tools. In my experience, they loves their CLI.

Text-only, no Javascript

https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/data/documentation/xco...

2011: https://manpagez.com/man/1/xcodebuild/

2016: https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/xcodebuild.1.html

Source code for xcodebuild not public

If you write Qt applications, Qt Creator is perfectly usable and as it's cross-platform you only need to be familiar with one IDE. It ships with its own deploy command which packages the app. You still need to run code signing/notarization last time I checked, but if the complaint is the XCode GUI then no problem there.

Yes, I know that. But I am not using Xcode. Claude is. That's the point.

Xcode’s a lot more than a wrapper for UNIX utilities. For example, it has an entire build system. It doesn’t just invoke xcodebuild under the hood—and even if it did, xcodebuild uses the exact same code to build your projects as the IDE.

Most of the problems that I saw people have with Xcode over the two decades that I worked on it were the result of one fundamental problem: They wanted to work a different way than Xcode is designed to work, and jumped through a ton of hoops to do so, and then blamed Xcode for not accommodating their intentional working at cross-purposes.

A good example: An app that considered itself “large” because it had a thousand tiny static library targets each with only one to three or so ObjC classes. Far smaller than Xcode itself, but because they insisted on working that way—for no real articulable benefit besides “that’s how we want to work”—their project took hours to build from scratch instead of minutes like much larger projects that have many fewer targets.

Thanks for your service on Xcode.

In my experience, it’s quite “crashy.” It often locks up so bad, that I need to force-quit (or force-restart the Mac). I end up doing that once a day, or so. I suspect that many of the performance and stability issues, have to do with resource usage. It’s a damn big app.

It can also end up in strange states, where portions of the UI fall “out of sync,” and the app needs to be restarted. Some operations (like opening a storyboard, or stopping at a breakpoint) introduce massive delays.

It’s not a denigration, calling something a UI shell. I’m working on one, right now. The engine and backend were done in April (started in February), and all the work since, was on the UI shell. I probably could have shipped something that “ticked all the boxes,” in May. It’s almost done, but there’s still a couple of months of testing, ahead.

Shameless plug: I've been working on strudel [0], a CLI that uses a lot of the same ideas in this post and allows you to build/sign/notarize Mac (and iOS) apps without touching Xcode. It has a dry run mode so you can see the actual commands being run, which was important to me to have so there's no mystery about what's happening.

I should blog about more this, but I also went to some effort to add support free iOS provisioning with just an Apple ID (using internal APIs); and creating a nice DMGs for macOS app distribution (reverse engineered .DS_store files for this). And there's also a built-in command to install skills for coding agents, which was fun.

This [1] is an example app I built with it, a simple utility to manage macOS file extension handling.

[0] https://github.com/octavore/strudel

[1] https://github.com/octavore/tots.app

In my experience, the better long-term choice if you're going to vibe code an app is to use Expo.

Its basis is React, so the code output quality is much higher than Swift because there is much more React code in LLM training data.

Everything is in the command line, and debugging is a breeze because it's a web view. But once it's compiled to native iOS, it feels like any other native app.

Expo + Fastlane = fully automated iOS submission and deployment. I issue one command and see a new version in the App Store.

Some parts when creating a new app cannot be automated right? Eg registering the app itself for example.

You can have your AI agent use computer-use to click around on in a browser open on developer.apple.com if that's counts as automated to you.

This one?? https://expo.dev/

   Our code broke
   It looks like there was an error we need to look at. Sorry about the inconvenience.

HN hug of death? seems to be back now.

fwiw, expo seems solid; the uptime of expo.dev won't affect an app built with it.

Everyone will still need to use Xcode for at least some debugging, no way around that.

As for the builds, your agent probably already knows how to do a lot of this from the command line, although explicit suggestions can help it build faster for different situations.

As for XcodeGen, you may find it unnecessary overhead if you're already using Xcode file system synced groups.

For iOS my biggest suggestion would be to enable App Store Connect skills for your agent (https://github.com/rorkai/App-Store-Connect-CLI).

With this not only do you not need Xcode all the time, you also don't even need to be near a MacBook.

Just make changes via Codex on your iPhone, the tell asc to build and upload to TestFlight, download and run the new version, iterate.

I’m chiming in here to say I did pretty much build an entire iOS app with agents, and it launched it on the App Store for me, along with a social push.

I only used Xcode to preview the builds on my device and then guide the prompts more

Thank you. I don't understand why this is so controversial (and why everything thinks Claude wrote my post).

There’s complete lldb debugging for Swift as plugin for VSCode.

This is cool but also makes me worried about the tendency with llms for all of us to make bespoke solutions rather than building a better community tool or extending an existing tool to solve the problem. fastlane exists to solve exactly this problem in the mobile space.

Also, shell scripts as part of a build are usually a little worrying. I'd at least want the build steps to be all integrated into my Makefile or CMakeLists.txt

Bespoke solutions are better in many cases. They do exact things required for the project without taking extra dependency. Reducing dependencies is beneficial, because dependencies require management. So with llms economy of taking dependency shifted.

... avoiding this problem: https://xkcd.com/974

everything has tradeoffs, on the one hand you are right you have one less dependency, on the other hand the maintenance of said dependency is now on you. many times app store connect has changed some api and fixing our release process was a matter of updating fastlane because the community had already dealt with it, that's on you if you have a bespoke delivery solution.

The llm is the better community tool. The important change is that you don't have to settle with someone developing a monolithic tool that happens to do what you need it to do. That was the way things used to need to be done because of the cost.

I have one weird trick for people who are exploring this vein. I last opened an Xcode project about five years ago so I could be way behind the times.

Having spent many years fighting with Xcode professionally, I was thrilled when swift build came out, and then appalled at how badly Xcode adopted it. Eventually I realized that you can set up your entire app as a swift package, and then the Xcode project with a single main source file that calls some `app_main()` (or whatever you want to call it) function in your package.

I cannot remember exactly but there was something annoying about setting up a new project; I think by default Xcode assumes that you want a swift package to be treated as a dependency that is checked out from git, but there was a way to drag and drop a local dependency in the same project directory and then it worked.

What this buys you is that files are no longer tracked by Xcode, so renames/merges no longer trigger project.pbxproj surgery. Instead you specify the swift package directories and are done.

I used this for some large personal projects and was very happy with it.

At one point I also wrote my own build tool that imitated all of the steps that Xcode took so that I could truly be Xcode-free. That also worked (and was not even that hard) but I went back to Xcode because the debugger UI was better than what I could get out of VS Code at the time, and especially because I was playing around with the Metal debugger.

  > set up your entire app as a swift package, and then the Xcode project with a single main source file that calls some `app_main()`

this is basically how i do all apps nowadays (at home and at $work), all settings for the ios side of things is in a xcconfig file and keeps things simple and working with multiple people is much more a breeze this way

I've been using agents to develop Mac and iOS apps for over a year now and I would say this post is bad advice, particularly because the excellent Xcode MCP requires Xcode to be running. The MCP tool gives you faster, better access to a number of functions for which xcodebuild is much slower and much chattier and a number of others (like the #Preview generation and rendering) that aren't possible at all while Xcode is closed. Also, in Xcode 27, the MCP & built-in agents are able to drive simulators with DeviceHub extremely well. (If you haven't been following, DeviceHub replaces Simulator.app and as far as I can tell, it's actually scrutable by agents without relying on hacking at the accessibility APIs with tools like axe.)

Xcode MCP is not perfect, by any stretch (stupidly, it issues a permission prompt on every single agent launch—something I defeated with a Keyboard Maestro hack to auto-accept it), but Xcode 27 is such a huge leap forward in the ergonomics of vibe coding with Xcode that I've actually stopped dealing with the MCP and (after an afternoon of futzing) have started using the app's own agent UI for driving Codex because that harness better steers the model to take advantage of the tools available.

All of this redounds to two things: faster feedback and more robust verification. The two things that matter most.

There’s Xcode-mcp-proxy that proxies Xcode’s mcp and adds clicking dialog and reconnects. How do you deal with macOS app testing? Do you use Peekaboo or plain screenshotting automation?

Can you link it? Quick google search didn’t reveal it

Gave the wrong name, this is it- https://github.com/lynnswap/XcodeMCPKit

Legend thanks a lot!

I would suggest trying out xcode mcp by Sentry, it’s much more comprehensive and doesn’t need running Xcode

What continues to bother me is just that developers who don’t have the budget are pretty much pushed out of iOS development because they can’t afford a Mac. And every time that Apple increases the price of their products, more people are blocked from being able to develop on them.

People not having access to tech is bothersome, but nowadays Apple offers affordable machines compared to the same/worse specs from competitors. For example a MacBook Air with Apple Silicon and a moderate amount of memory.

Why should you need a Mac to build for iOS at all? What makes Apple so special here? Cross-compilation toolchains aren't forbidden alien technology.

Forcing people onto Macs is such a pathetic way of extracting rent from developers and makes workflows worse. No you can't just build and debug your app from your Windows or Linux workstation because we want you to buy hardware you don't need. Sorry we only support Xcode on the latest version of MacOS, how else will your build machine roll out of the OS support window and make you replace a functioning machine?

It's especially nice when you work on projects that aren't iOS/Apple native and you don't get Mac workstations. You end up with this wonderful mess of shared machines and half assed tools because you just need the bare minimum to push a build to a phone.

I don't disagree with you, but we're talking about affordability which is a different topic.

> It's especially nice when you work on projects that aren't iOS/Apple native and you don't get Mac workstations.

If you develop natively for macOS, then you probably need the OS for it. It's the same for Linux and Windows. But building is not the biggest hurdle because you can build in your usage-based-billed/free CI as well the same way you do for other platforms.

For complete native development (system APIs, OS interactions, native UI) against macOS/iOS on PC, Apple needs to open those OSes for PCs/Pixels/Samsungs/etc. This is a software issue, not hardware. Otherwise Apple silicon Macs are less restrictive than PC hardware in general!

I'm not really sure how any machine is more affordable than the $0 it should cost because you shouldn't need a Mac. It's absolutely true that you can get by with a base spec Mac Mini, but often you can't with bigger projects and the cost skyrockets because Apple prices memory like kidneys (current market conditions aside, they've always done it).

I have nothing against the hardware. I despise how artificial the problem is. It's not even like Apple just refuse to provide tools and leave it up to the community. They force you to use a Mac in the terms of service.

For context I work on the mobile team for a large AAA game engine. This is going to colour my opinion because we're very Windows centric, but my experience wouldn't exist if it weren't for Apple. I need to sync code on two different machines and build half the project on Windows and the other half on the Mac. If we could just build and debug the iPhone on Windows none of this mess would be needed.

We don't develop for MacOS, we develop for iOS. Just debugging the app requires several hoops across multiple machines because of Apple's policy here. Just because a base spec Mac Mini is cheap doesn't make this whole problem any less stupid. I don't need a vendor's special-sauce computer to build for consoles. Cross compilation and remote debugging has existed for decades, this problem should not exist.

Calling it more affordable because Mac Minis aren't junk anymore is really just accepting Apple's ridiculous requirement because "I guess it could be worse right?".

> I don't need a vendor's special-sauce computer to build for consoles.

This is ironic. Of course you do. You're already using it. You just happen to like the Microsoft's walled garden and not Apples. That's fine, but let's not pretend that "Windows centric" is anything but another monopolistic and exclusionary ecosystem. If you want to use Nvidia drivers, or develop against DirectX, can you do it on a macOS? I get the criticism of Apple's walled garden and I'm against it too, but not from your position.

Because it would cost Apple a substantial amount of money to make it possible to build your code for iOS on other platforms in any sort of supported fashion. So all the stuff they invest very substantial amounts of money into creating and maintaining are only going to be licensed for use on the hardware they sell under the latest operating system it runs. Asking for more is asking them to spend more money without any evidence of a commensurate return.

If you can produce a properly structured submission to the App Store ingestion pipeline without using a Mac, then I doubt Apple will care. But that doesn’t mean they’re obligated to help you, and especially not to spend millions of dollars to do so.

The Apple developer terms of service require all app submissions to come from a Mac.

Apple could've chosen to offer no tools and leave it to the community to build their own. I think that's reasonable. I don't expect Microsoft to bring MSVC to Linux.

But Apple take the explicit position that you must purchase a Mac in order to ship apps for iOS.

Oh no. The horror. How terrible.

It’s not really that onerous for a platform to require that, to develop for it, you need to actually take part in it. For Apple platforms that means becoming a Mac user. For IBM i and z that also means getting substantial hardware or paying for accounts and licenses (once you want to go beyond learning).

You can develop for Linux and BSD and Haiku and all sorts of other platforms for free. If the cost is what matters to you, then just do that. If you’re doing it as a business, though, consider that you’re extremely lucky to be able to just buy a low-end device and a low-end system and that’s all the capital investment needed (plus the US$100/year membership as recurring opex).

If you’re paying the $100/year to publish to the store you also get access to Xcode cloud, which you can point at a repo and it will build snd archive for you to distribute to testflight. I opened xcode to test locally in simulator the first time but haven’t had to since.

Using godot iOS export.

For regular old native ios dev replacing Xcode i don’t think i would do it.

Check also Sweetpad CLI. It’s basically wrapper around xcodebuild, but humans and agents. It’s my next project after Sweetpad VSCode extension for developing iOS/Swift applications in VSCode. Cli is still in beta, but I see on my own project that it’s already quite pleasant to use

1. https://sweetpad.hyzyla.dev/

2. https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad

I've been using essentially this process (with Claude Code) for about six months. There are a couple of places where I've opened xcode; mostly to update the simulators for new betas of xcode 27, and once to add a target for Apple Watch (and I think something for HealthKit).

Interestingly, since about Opus 4.6, Claude has been able to reason its way into this process on its own. It was clunky until 4.7, and in 4.8 it's managed to find its way around every reason I had to open xcode myself.

Shout out to fastlane! I would have loved to have found it sooner in my app shipping journey.

I just set up my pipeline to do this exact thing for both the Apple and Android ecosystems, dispatching loads to my mac studio or Linux box accordingly. I moved the runners off GitHub because uptime for GitHub actions has been trash lately, and the Apple Silicon runners are pricey.

Claude was great at figuring out what was broken when and either fixing it, or clicking as far as it could until it needed me.

You could say I'm mostly just IRL hands for the AI now.

I have a nice setup on my Linux for iOS apps. I compiled the OSXCross toolchain, and also copied iPhoneOS.sdk and iPhoneSimulator.sdk from the macOS VM. With some wrappers, I can compile iOS apps (Obj-C) on my Linux machine, sign them with zsign, and use go-ios to install them on the device.

At first, I just used simulator builds to test (and debug) on the macOS VM, in the simulator, but that was slow and painful. Finally, I bought a used iPhone, all bruised, just so I could test it on a real device. The main issue for me was signing, one cannot register a macOS VM (maybe with some kext hacks?), I managed to enable developer mode on the phone (crazy process, but it worked with Xcode in a VM), I registered the phone on the website, and paid those damn 99$.

I used that for my cross-platform UI library with native controls, based on IUP. Now, future users of the UI toolkit do not need to care about Mac, iOS, or tooling; it just works. You can check the toolkit (WIP) here https://github.com/gen2brain/iup-go .

The comments here clearly point out that building and shipping have been the automatable parts (and for some time now).

To anyone who's chased a crash that only reproduces on a physical device knows the fix was never more log statements added by ai but rather a breakpoint, the debugger, and thirty unglamorous minutes of stepping through code line-by-line (terminal lldb technically counts, but barely).

Regardless of the vibe coding aspect, there's good information here for anyone new to the mac/ios build/distribution workflows.

I went to build an open source app from GitHub and was pretty surprised that it requires Xcode and that Xcode can't really be installed without an apple id. I do not want to make one and I certainly will not sign my computer into one.

I did end up somehow installing Xcode via some shady download and was on my way. But the whole ordeal left a very sour taste.

Though the primary way of installing Xcode is via MAS (requiring Apple ID login), Xcode can be downloaded from the Apple Developer website without an ADP membership, though you do have to log in to the website with an Apple ID. You don’t have to log into the Mac with an Apple ID though, you can then install and use it on a Mac without an Apple ID (though you will need one inside Xcode to sign apps to get them to run on an iOS device).

Running a Mac without an Apple ID feels like an exercise in masochism. I wasn’t aware one could even still it through first run without

Why do you need one?

I think because the only places you can download it from are either from the App Store or logging into Apple’s developer’s website.

Heck you can't even compile against many of the Mac APIs without a cert unlocked by a paid developer account.

Interesting this is coming across as novel. This is how CI build machines for Apple’s platforms have been setup in perpetuity.

True, but it'd take me a while / forever to figure out how. Reminds me of when I yelled at Gemini until it'd make me a Minecraft Bukkit plugin without installing anything besides the JDK, way easier task but it was still insisting on Gradle for a while.

Not just build machines. Years ago I scripted the entire build process to create hundreds of apps based on parameters and submit them. It was an attempt to work around the horrible App Store search. The original app had packages of content that could be purchased, but it was hard to convey from the single app listing. Eventually Apple said don't do that and we reverted back, but at that point we had moved on to something completely different.

Making your app buildable from the CLI is not something I do personally to use on my Mac but it is very useful when you're automating your CI. If you have GitHub Actions set up to build your app, so can Claude, assuming you have the right signing setup on your machine.

Having to have Xcode installed is more than half the problem. It makes Visual Studio look lightweight.

Xcode does have (or had, haven't checked for a while) a lightweight "command line tools only" installer. Unfortunately, that installer omits a lot of the actual useful command line tools, like the notary and stapler tools. I also recall that the command line tool only installer leaves out things like the metal compiler, too. Not sure what the point of it is.

> Not sure what the point of it is.

My only familiarity with it is because it's needed by brew. I honestly never looked into exactly what is in the package, but I assumed things like what is installed with -devel packages of yum/apt-get/dnf/etc. Lots of repos have common list of things to install like gcc/make/etc. Again, just guessing, but it's one of the first things I've always run on a new Mac to get it usable for CLI usage.

It lets you build basic UNIX-like tools.

It’s mostly all the emulators and platform APIs.

I’m not defending Xcode (I hate it), just clarifying.

I spent seven years as a dev on the Xcode team and this is pretty much my exact workflow these days.

Thank you for your service. Xcode gets a bad rap from developers but for beginners, it doesn’t overwhelm them, giving them a great entry experience into app development.

Thank you for your comment. Prior to Apple, I worked on the Visual Studio team for 10 years. Now that is a complex app now matter how experienced you are. ;-)

React Native + Expo is also a good option if you want to touch the iOS/Android IDEs as little as possible. You use Xcode and Android studio to install the device sims and then expos tool chain handles the rest, even for deploying to stores. If you are on a windows computer and can’t install Xcode, you can even run your iOS app directly on an iPhone with their managed app.

Ignite is a great starter using RN and Expo. Some great people maintaining it. https://github.com/infinitered/ignite

+1 for Expo, their Expo Application Services are great and have a free tier.

npx expo run:ios --device #runs a build on my iphone and shows logs in the terminal

eas build --platform ios --profile preview #builds in the cloud and gives me a QR code to install a build on my device with a custom certificate

eas build --platform ios --profile production --auto-submit #auto increments and submits a production build to the app store.

Thought this was going to be about the new Ruby Native!

https://rubynative.com

“From bundle install to your phone in minutes. To the App Store and Google Play without a line of native code.“

holy hell $299/app is wild

One time?! That's amazing.

Per year, but still amazing. I'd like to think of myself who knows what he is doing, but I just launched a Rails-based platform for a client on web, iOS and Android, and had to spend an annoying amount of time in Google Play and App Store Connect. $299 would be a tiny fraction of the billable hours I'd have to spend messing around in there, and that's not counting mobile app dev time at all, so I'm on the lookout for a good candidate project to try Ruby Native on!

per app per year

You can as well make it simpler and use those skills:

https://github.com/software-mansion/argent

https://github.com/callstack/agent-device

both callstack and swmansion are mostly react native shops but those should work even in native ios/android as well

Doesn't that mean you need to distribute the app (TestFlight) before you can preview your app? How do you test locally without the simulators?

For a macOS app you don't need a simulator. For an iPhone app I've seen Claude Code launch the simulator without me needing to open Xcode.

I built an iOS simulator simulator, though only for RN. Runs in browser but covers 100% of the API of RN, iOS UI, and the top 1k native libraries basically now. Been an ongoing agentic experiment of mine that's about ready to release.

Kind of fun, you can develop iOS and Android both without a build step and without a Mac even.

Testing != Distribution. You can run directly on a connected iOS device, without setting up anything related to the app store.

In addition to the challenged Xcode, just using Swift seems to require a lot more tokens for both coding and dealing with build/platform quirks. Probably not super significant on indie scale but for anything more robust, it builds up quickly.

React Native and Flutter seem to be much more predictable for the bots (and more fun for humans, since they have actual hot reload).

This seems like a lot. I told my oh-my-pi agent to build my ios app for me and send it to me remotely. After some chugging, it gave me a tailscale funnel link. And it worked. I didn't have to dig into any of this stuff. I didn't use the words "Developer ID-sign", "notarize", or "staple" in my prompt.

The main iPhone app I maintain for work is 100% claude edited now ... I don't touch the code anymore ... I do occasionally look at it. It does a way better job than I could. I do have Xcode open as claude does its thing ... and I occasionally sign and deploy with Xcode. No coding though.

I find it hard to believe xcodegen is in a state where it would reliably generate xcodeproj for all edge states (widgets, watchos app, notification extensions …) - it certainly wasn’t when I last tried it for Weathergraph few years ago.

That said, it might be well enough for simpler apps.

What's a not-simple app? I've had Claude generate:

* A Markdown viewer (obviously pretty simple)

* A menu bar Apple TV remote (surprisingly complicated)

* A menu bar and desktop temperature tracker for the silly Tapo temperature trackers I have all over my house (a little complicated because multiple user interfaces, a backing database, scheduling, and multiple local/remote protocol interfaces)

* A graphical CAS calculator frontend to Sage Math with LaTeX math rendering

* An LLMwiki implementation that uses macOS filesystem extensions to reflect a SQLite database into a local filesystem for agents to traverse (basically the new macOS way to do FUSE, fussy enough that the app has to run out of /Applications to work)

* An agent-driven Music.app replacement with AirPlay streaming support managing Apple Music catalogs and tracks

All of these have worked without me ever once touching the xcode UI, except one time to generate Apple Developer certificates, which I then drove exclusively from CLI tools.

These are all pretty modern SwiftUI applications.

Afaik these are all single target apps. I was talking about extensions, watchos companion apps ...

Xcode 27 which is in beta ships a much better codex integration. There are problems in Xcode that are frustrating . Also, git integrations are a nice touch that allow you to force push too. Would be interesting to find out how well this works in a team based setting.

Xcode 27 beta 3 has been the most stable release I've ever used. The type checking improvements were understated so I gotta laugh at this xcode avoidance.

Areas they could improve - what ever the heck is going on in their diffing ui for source control.

I use this script to build and notarize macOS apps, you might find it useful as well: https://github.com/muquit/NotarizeMacApp

I've built a few small MacOS dock widgets now by just telling Claude/OpenCode to build them. Works well enough if you're very explicit.

The most useful one is a little weather sparkline to show local temperature forecasts. Useful every day.

What framework was it written in, and does it trigger a scary warning from the OS when you try to install it?

I don't know why XCode gets the hate it does. It's a solid IDE which I've used for years with only minimal issues. It's certainly no more or less buggy than anything JetBrains releases.

Wait, I am not aware that I've done ANY of those setup steps, yet I'm building iOS and macOS apps without XCode. Both Claude and Codex handle it just fine and didn't ask me for any setup steps.

The pain people go through not to use XCode, for me it does the job.

It’s incredible to me the lengths these people will go to just to avoid using the standard tools.

the path of most resistance... sometimes i wonder if apple's insistence on a mac + paid membership is a kind of intentional filter, like they want someone who's devoted enough to invest 100 bucks + a mac etc

I don't see the point of this, if you use Claude or whatever frontier LLM you like, you need Xcode only to start emulators / install app on phones or to upload a binary.

Being outside of the approved development loop has rough edges. How do you keep the app from putting up that permission to access documents folder all the time while you rebuild it?

They're a paid developer, so they are probably signing the app with a stable identity that avoids this.

I mainly run the app from Xcode because it’s the easiest way to view the logs. If I build and install the app this way instead, what’s the best way to view the logs?

built cable detective like this https://apps.apple.com/at/app/cable-detective/id6765963737?l... and the soon to come https://aifcc.franzai.com/ which is more ambitious

honestly would not even know what to do / click in xcode

Although this has been well known for years and documented.

Yeah, but not only was this "on a computer" but "with an AI" so it's not the same at all. /s

Not using Xcode is the greatest improvement in quality of life I have known aside from recovering from a debilitating back injury. So good.

You still have to open Xcode (to get the certs), and you still have to accept the Xcode EULA. Title is quite misleading if not outright false.

As someone who tried my very best to not open Xcode for building and shipping Mac and iOS apps, I agree, there are things there are literally no way around opening the GUI, not even terminal utilities for. You cannot do this 100% headless, which is what I attempted at first.

I do something similar in GitHub actions. Every new app is setup in a few minutes to star getting rejected by iOS and Android.

The first Mac app I ever built, which was at least 6 months ago using only AI, was purely LLM without XCode at all.

Very cool! Does this assume you're never editing code by hand or can you use editors like VSCode or Cursor as well?

Oh god, the app store does not need more slop. If you can't be bothered to open XCode (which I agree is a dumpster fire, but), you shouldn't be bothered to submit an app that a person has to review and another person has to filter out of their search results.

Counterpoint: XCode is such slop that an app made by a developer with the taste to avoid it has a higher probability of being less "sloppy" than average.

The 'developer' isn't even developing much of anything tho

This is generally not true

I don't know if that's really practical unless you're full-on-vibe coding or you avoid all the native frameworks. You kinda need XCode for a lot of things. I personally really dislike XCode after having to use it for like a decade and having it crash six times a day, so I feel people's pain in wanting to avoid it, but I also think slopping up the app store with vibe code monstrosities is not something that should be encouraged. Bad ideas are better made inconvenient..

Or use https://swiftbundler.dev/ ?

I’ve done this forever on Foqos. Have a makefile, never even open Xcode and the instructions are in the agents md

I thought this would be a flutter post. Love flutter, ... , well I like flutter compared to Kotlin and Swift

Last I used flutter, editable text views was where it wasn't acceptable for me. On iOS, the default text view comes with a lot of built in stuff automatically such as cut copy paste, lookup definition, translate etc. Flutter's didn't have these.

By using "Claude Code"*

* and giving Anthropic all your secrets, env vars, certificates and your source code to them.

Not if you've got a good sandbox.

Do you have one?

Yup, I built one! https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai

You can even run simulators in it if you choose the Tart backend.

And how is your vibe coded sandbox better than 1000 other sandboxes?

You'll never know. And that's fine.

What bad things to you anticipate Anthropic doing with your secrets, env vars, and certificates?

Is this a joke?

Anthropic isn't great at keeping stuff private as we saw with the Claude Code leak. The more information they get access to the bigger the risk.

What could go wrong? Might Apple change something across five ecosystems and leave you in the lurch, and now you have to go through all the slop to try to fix it?

I've used opencode on a plane with local models to make small updates to local MacOS apps. It's not fast or amazing, but it does work well enough to do trivial changes.

But also yes this is a real concern.

I prefer Tuist (writing Project.swift) to XcodeGen but otherwise, yeah, this tracks

Skimmed the article. Pretty close to my workflow using fastlane with tauri.

Useful sanity check!

This is how i am developing keptrecipes.com. Been a pleasure this way TBH.

I do it exactly like described here. Nice to see an article about it.

> notarytool authenticates using a stored keychain profile that you create once, interactively — it prompts for an app-specific password, and there’s no way around the prompt.

You can use `--password <password>` (yeah, yeah, passwords on the command line are bad; I'm just challenging "there's no way around the prompt.")

Later (contradicting itself):

> The one step that stays interactive is notarytool store-credentials, and that’s a choice rather than a limitation: you could pass --password and script it, but that means putting an app-specific password in your shell history.

You can configure your shell to ignore history when needed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6475524/how-do-i-prevent...

https://superuser.com/questions/352788/how-to-prevent-a-comm...

(And if it's in a script, it won't be in your history anyway.)

> These passwords go stale silently whenever you change your Apple ID password

You can use an ASC API key instead. This can be either a team key ("developer" access level) or an individual key.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appstoreconnectapi...

small issue: xcodebuild will just randomly fail sometimes. And the solution is to... open and close Xcode. I wish this wasn't true, but it is.

Can LLM do this too? If yes, then it’s annoying but is not a blocker.

> Without Ever Opening Xcode

"Next, open Xcode"

Tangentially, I despise Xcode and love the Expo ecosystem and all the lovely tooling that they have built. It is React Native but Expo honestly makes it so trivial to build stuff from the CLI without ever needing to open that abomination of an app. And with AI, I have built a lot of side project apps onto my iPhone, like a homelab app for monitoring my cameras with push notifications whenever someone is at the door, starting my irrigation and a whole lot more. Plus Tailscale of course. Kind of a crazy world that we live in now.

Yes, I remember React Native being quite painful before Expo!

Upgrading from one version to the next especially so.

Expo seems to shield you from a lot of issues, without really taking any power away from you either.

The thing is, in a perspective, who would need any apps at all? Users will get what they want from AI directly.

Or use Gondolin, or SmolVMs

What about debugging?

If you prefer your builds composed of declarative and incremental targets, see

https://github.com/inopinatus/sublime_url/blob/main/Makefile

Same shit with a bit of structure.

I shipped my iOS app without opening Xcode (well, I had to open it to get some provisioning stuff to work). I still use Visual Studio Code to kick off the simulator, but other than that, I use no IDE at all. Claude writes all the code in Flutter.

IDEs are dead, prove me wrong.

Honestly I thought this was the standard because god help me Xcode is terrible.

Don't make apps for iOS. The apple ecosystem is horrendous

Reply on news.ycombinator.com