Open Letter to Tim Cook: Please fix Xcode (Daily basis pain of the Apple developers)

[Edit: Sepcial thank to 🇫🇷 journalists iGen for investigating deeper]

Xcode est-il devenu le maillon faible de la chaîne de développement d'Apple ?

In 2011, Xcode has known its biggest change: The merge between the former version of Xcode and Interface Builder into a single tool: Xcode. But since this merge, I have the deep “feeling” that Xcode is getting worse and worse, unstable, year after year. To have something you never had you have to do something you never did. Here what I wrote to Tim and more details of the issues encountered by us, iOS/macOS/[x]OS developers. Clap it, share it, tweet / retweet it: https://twitter.com/SaezChristopher/status/1770928340641218997

Dear Mr. Tim Cook,

I am writing to you as a dedicated and passionated iOS developer, 12 years old experienced, but also as a member of the Apple community frustrated by the current state of Xcode, the code editor for applications within the Apple ecosystem. Over the years, we have witnessed a consistent degradation in the quality of this vital tool for our work, and it deeply affects our development experience.

It is undeniable that Apple has always been at the forefront of technological innovation, offering us outstanding quality products that shape our daily lives. However, it is hard to ignore the glaring shortcomings of Xcode, which seem to worsen year after year. iOS developers are faced with a frustrating development experience, marked by recurring bugs, unstable performance, and an unintuitive user interface.

Compared to its main competitor, Android Studio, Xcode unfortunately lags behind in many aspects. Android developers benefit from a smoother development environment, with advanced features and superior stability. It is disappointing to see that Xcode, an essential tool for creating high-quality iOS applications, fails to compete with Android Studio in terms of user-friendliness and performance. Even the latest stable feature, the debugger is now broken on simulator for non-iOS17.x devices ☹️. We are loosing precious hours of work.

As dedicated developers within the Apple ecosystem, we are aware of your company’s commitment to excellence. We know that you constantly strive to deliver exceptional products and services to your users. However, we urge you today to pay special attention to Xcode and address the growing distress of iOS developers (you can just look at X to see the trolls about Xcode).

We understand that perfection is hard to achieve, but we firmly believe that significant improvements can be made to Xcode to make it a top-notch development tool. We encourage you to invest more in the quality and reliability of Xcode, listening to feedback from the developer community and implementing necessary changes to meet their needs.

In conclusion, we urge you, Mr. Cook, to take immediate action to improve Xcode and make the iOS developer experience a top priority for Apple. We are confident that with your leadership and commitment to excellence, we can make Xcode a development tool worthy of Apple’s reputation.

Thank you sincerely for your attention to this crucial issue, and we sincerely hope that you will take positive steps to improve Xcode in the near future 🌈.

Respectfully,

Chris Saez

Xcode the worst IDE in 2024 ?

I don’t really know if it’s the worst IDE ever, in 2024 or since a long time but as an Android and iOS developer, I saw the gap increased, year after year between Xcode and Android, Xcode and JetBrains collections.

The missing features

• No real plugin system: Everything released in AndroidStudio, plugins are just unapplicable to Xcode and we have to find unofficial, hacky plugin to compile from developers themselves. In the past there were Alcatraz, but it’s dead.
• AI: Github Copilot, Codium, Codeium or others have official plugin for AndroidStudio. Nothing official except workaround, time consuming, weird buggy plugins, by keeping in mind that a Xcode update could break it at anytime
• Integrated terminal: No need more explanations…
• Basic features: Refactoring, syntaxic color

The bugs and crashes

I don’t remember a day without having a single crash of the IDE or a weird bug since …. several years, but it’s getting worse with Xcode 14+:

• Errors hidden in the logs extra tabs / Not well displayed
• Crashes during almost any Git command executed
• Crashes during refactoring, crashes on InterfaceBuilder, Project Builder
• Buggy debugger in iOS 16.x
• Bad SPM integration and Buggy SPM integration: I quit Xcode, I remove manually the DerivedData folder, I relaunch Xcode, I wait for resolving the graph dependencies.

All of this are easily reproductible, of course and some of them exist since several years and are still here.

The future

I really though that Apple was working in the secret of a new IDE, or want to buy existing one (like the partnership between Jetbrains and Google) but the announcement with Xcode cloud and the AI in Xcode makes me believe that it’s not a the roadmap. We love the Apple Ecosystem, their product are very cool but we want also to work in a confort , without being guilty to be paid to be an Xcode workaround — Do not make it crash- expert. I hope the future will change 🚀 ❤️🍏