Apples developer experience in 2026

I have worked on software for Apple devices on and off during my career. It even goes as far back as working on a desktop application, before things were called apps or the little glass slabs became our daily companion. Some of my highlights include having an app featured in the AppStore, working on an Apple Watch integration and having day one support (mostly, thanks review process) and some other fun stuff.

I stopped working on mac-related apps in 2018 when Apple’s behavior towards developers, the general quality of the AppStore and review process and the absolutely idiotic rules they sometimes apply to some people made me focus solely on the web.

Fast forward to 2026. Xcode 26 shipped with agentic editing and I am working on a personal assistant which means at one point I will have to setup a Unity - Xcode build pipeline to have Endirillia talk to me when I am not in the office.

Xcode 26 is more of a dumpster fire than this software ever was. On a mostly blank project with only a chat interface (read: a view to render messages in and an input field) it reproducibly crashes. The bug report window also crashes. I tested this on two systems to make sure I am not crazy and the memory in my Studio is not dying.

The agent is also not the smartest. It might produce code that can work. But it regularly gets confused between iOS and macOS if the app targets both environments, messes up imports and does not bother to fix errors it produces. Why have a loop when you can one shot everything and let the user click "generate fix" repeatedly, right?

All that aside, what actually made me nearly throw the whole thing out of the window was the developer portal.

When I wanted to run the application on my phone, Xcode told me I need to sign it. Okay, fair. That is nothing new. I signed in to my free / personal account and got an error that I exhausted the number of devices I can provision.

I signed in to the web interface and could not go to the device management section, because this is not enabled on a free account. Allegedly devices are removed after 6 months of inactivity. I have devices from 2015 to 2018 stuck in my account. (Wait how I found out.)

We will soon be releasing an app we are working on and want to sign it for all major platforms. So instead of fixing my private account, why not sign up for a business account and call it a day. (Advantage of owning the business is that no one can stop me from signing my personal software with this account as well.)

Well. The captcha bugged three times. As a result of that my whole email domain was put on a deny list and I could not create an account anymore, even if I would have gotten the wrinkly lines which were supposed to be characters deciphered properly.

So back to my personal account I went, which will now get an update for business purposes. I paid the 99 Euro to see six devices long decommissioned in the list. Deleted them, went back to Xcode and hit deploy.

This produced a new error, saying I have to enable developer mode on my phone. Once I did that I got a warning that this will make my phone less secure. No further context. Because why would you. Will you turn off my authentication? Upload my data to an FTP? Or just expose debugger symbols? Who knows. Reboot and another warning screen how horribly insecure my phone will be.

This was the point where I hit "no", deleted the Xcode project and took a note to provision code-sign for our project. I am not doing this dance anymore.

There is a unity web player out there, I will most likely start with that one and see how far I can push it to get to a decent experience bringing my assistant to my phone.

Some days I wish the grass on the other side of the walled garden fence would actually be greener.