Xcode 9 is Unacceptable

I agree. Xcode in general, not just 9, is a disgrace.

It is suffice to say that Apple is apparently not bothered by the fact that it releasing, year after year, a 2-star application on the App Store.

Everything related to Apple development is a piece of crap. iTunesConnect is a nightmare. The documentation is written by satan, with total disdain and lack of care.

It is pretty clear to me that Apple hates develpers and is only interested on consumers.

We, developers, should unite and create a group to press apple.

It works perfectly for me. I'm using it to develop applications with C/Objective C for OS X. This and other reviews like this on the App Store appear to be posted by developers that are building apps for iOS, using Swift. I'm SO GLAD I didn't migrate to Swift.

I've been in the software development business for 50+ years. What I observe and experience with the Xcode issues that impact me (and others) -- degredation in software quality - is this: it is the classic example of the engineering tradeoff of quality for schedule. Apple marketing appears to be in the driver's seat and Apple Engineering cannot standup / push back hard enough to allow sufficient time for software inspections and testing of macOSs and iOS!

Watts Humphrey's excellent book, "Winning with Software: An Executive Startegy", points out the fallacy of trading off quality for schedule. Quality saves time and money, period. Years of personal experience in the software development testify to this fact. Moreover, well-published software quality experts like Capers Jones and Stephen H. Kan also attest to this software engineering fact!

In particular, Chapter 4 in Humphrey's book, "Why Quality Pays Off", points out that if the software engineering organization does not manage the quality aspects of software development, no one else in the company will! That is the dilema that Craig Federighi faces today inside Apple.

Unfortunately, with regards to all Apple software development (i.e., macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS), it appears that Apple software engineering management neither understands nor can stand up to the pressures coming from Apple Marketing with regards to the engineering tradeoff between software quality and development schedule.

I opine that the annual schedule for new, major releases of macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS (and the accompanying dog-and-pony shows) are at the heart of poor quality issues in Apple software. Tim Cook and Craig Federighi are the only Apple managers that can fix this problem. Poor software quality over time will eventually catchup with Apple and impact its bottom-line. That's when the quality problem will be addressed!!

As a start, over the next year, I suggest that the next major release of macOS and iOS (Versions 10.14 and 12, respectively) consist of bug fixes only - no new features. I believe this would be a good start in the right direction to stablize these software platforms!

Agree.

Xcode 9 is a real shame, and an absolute pain in the **** to use. CPU >100% (and thus fan noise), failed autocompletes, slow compile times, folding ribbon disappeared, super-slow debugger with Swift, regular crashes... w*f ?

Things get a bit better when coding with ObjC only. Doesn't help to adopt Swift as main programming language 🙂

I've been developing for 15+ years, and on iOS since 4+ years. This is the first Xcode release that makes me regret Android coding.

Sadly, it's just (IMHO) a symptom of the whole Apple software ecosystem degrading in the recent years. Quality is not there anymore.

Even worse, I really have the impression that Apple never listens to developers, and totally ignores their rants about buggy software.

I'm just like you man, I'm sticking to ObjC as much as I can, all my new projects are still pure ObjC.

Swift is not a bad language, but the tools around it (xcode, autocomplete, debugger, syntax highlightning...) are a pure mess, and super annoying to work with.

IMO, people working only with Swift are just driven by the hype (as with every new Apple product - and I consider myself an Apple fan !), and do not even (want to ?) see the regression of the development tools.

I totally agree that XCode is a mess, and that Apple has its in-house development team on a tight budget.

Apple has been reducing their budget for development each year. There is no time to fix bugs, do refactoring or improve components when their development team is very busy with the next big thing. This is for both OSX & iOS. Apple really does NOT care about us (developers) any more.

We should all be looking in migrating our knowledge over to Android!

The day Apple releases a 17 inch Macbook is the day Apple has decided to care about developers again.

This will never happen of course. (Tight budgets you know, they need to make more money!)

Hi everybody,

I'm so happy to see that I'm not alone and at the same time unhappy to see so many of us having so much trouble with the latest version of Xcode.

Since version 9.1, and still in beta version 9.2, every time I press the Enter key, XCode crash!

This is terrible because it happens 25 to 50 times a day and... it's exhausting. 😢

I tested: it happens even on a project that I had not opened for months ...

It seems that the problem is related to the editor of Xcode which writes more things in the memory than it should do ...

Yet, I'm lucky to have a Macbook Pro with 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory ...

After restarting Xcode and trying to modify the file again, then auto-completion does not work anymore and the debugger does not stop on the correct line.

It took me several hours to understand why autocompletion didn't work and what was going on and I discovered, by opening my source file in an other text editor, that my source code was totally corrupted by the crash of Xcode!

Indeed, I saw that Xcode has replaced itself all end line characters by '<CR>' characters. Why not… but only if it works after!

I, of course, reported this bug, but I have no answer (they just asked me to redownload one of my source file).

Curiously, this problem does not exist in version 9.0.1 with exactly the same code!

To imagine why this is so frustrating for me, you just imagine:

You use Microsoft Word every day and, after an automatically update, that suddenly it crashes every time you try to press the Enter key in your document … And, for sure, you don’t know why.

I admit: I like to put spaces between all parentheses, I like to put a new line before and after all my braces, and I like to align my code with tabulations... For my brain, my code must be beautiful. Are these crashes are because of my way of programming?

I love you Apple, but here... this is just not acceptable!

PS:I want to say that I'm not tired and that I have a happy life .... I just want to be able to develop my projects normally again with Xcode.

I agree, I sense a dramatic deteroration in support for Developers, with regard to developer technology quality.

I'd prefer stable tools with reliable features, than rush to market "buggy" bells and whistles.

Today I updated MACOS 10.13.2 Beta (17C67b) The simulator is suddenly very sluggish. The previous version ran smoothly.

I'm running the default SpriteKit template.

Also, I can no long build to my device. I have iOS 11.2 installed on a 5s. It seems I have to purchase a new device.

this is the error I get:

This iPhone 5s (Model A1453, A1533) is running iOS 11.2 (15C5107a), which may not be supported by this version of Xcode.

I appreciate any suggestions.

Agree, Xcode 9 is the worst version to date. It seems like the Xcode team has no idea what is doing. Pretty sure an app like Xcode 9 will fail Apple review policies. For me the UI is frozen most of the time, typing is a struggle, autocomplete is freezing and have to go back and correct it, build times are very high. Getting a lot of crashes and builds failing to run on the sim. Overall Xcode is sluggish - almost unbearable to work with it. Switched back to 8.3 and will use this version as long as possible.

Lately, fueled by some questionable Apple decisions, thinking more and more about stop doing iOS development. Been doing it for 7 years. Just don't think Apple has the leading edge in any domain, anymore. Sooner or later people will get tired of overpriced phones and accessories.

i read lots of complaining and moaning, maybe it's a generational thing? of devs becoming too dependent on some gui to do everything.

i'm still on version 8.3.3 and i'm on the swift email list and decided long ago, i wasn't going to touch swift4.0 or xcode 9 until xcode is at least 9.2 there are tools available to completely build, sign swift projects without ever touching Xcode and I've used them many times.

btw when is the Swift ABI finally going to be released?

IMHO if you know how to hack code, Xcode is irrelevant but then again i cut my teeth with the command line things like sed/grep/awk/vi back when the only gui was a lame version of ddd. when you need to hack code, you hack code, you do whatever is necessary, no excuses. like writing a killer perl one-liner or an awesome sed script.

the bad or lack of documentation doesn't bother me but the abject lack of modernizing the core libs. patching and patching old gcc4.2, where is the built-in support for flac? x265? matroska? and S Jobs would not like that Apple has totally forgotten about things like typesetting like the new-ish svg-open fonts is only supported on the browser.

too much marketing not enough focus on the core fundamentals.

Apple, I'd like a new MBP model of the 17", send me an email, i'll send you specs.

I'm in complete agreement with you. Xcode seems to get a great deal of attention because it's always being updated. For what? I've been using Xcode since 2008 and it's always been "pretty bad but good enough". Now with Swift all of its problems are exacerbated to an unacceptable degree. Swift compilation, code-completion, auto-suggest work abysmallly, and they aren't even the worst problem. These processes are more complex for Swift than Obj-C and it the overhead renders Xcode dumb (SourceKit I guess but Xcode provides our UI into these various dev tools).

Since the advent of Swift (which I love) Xcode is no longer remotely "good enough"; the complete lack of incremental compilation of Swift has driven me almost insane. I've turned Google purple in my search for what build setting (library search paths, or whole module optimisation...) actually makes incremental compilation work. Discussing this my co-ios devs, devs from old companies I work at, and devs who used to work at my current workplace, the only conclusion is that there is no way to make incremental compilation work.

This is not tennable. The other bugs, fine. But this will lead me to quit the platform as a dev. I can't spend hundreds of minutes a day compiling.

The only alternative is AppCode which no ios developer I work with (or have met in real life) actually uses; the difference now is that I now know several who have actually downloaded it and tried it, inlcuding me. There is no actual alternative. We're stuck with a bad IDE that just gets worse.

If people respond to this saying "it works fine for me" then congratulations.

It works very very poorly for a huge number of developers, in particular ones who work on large apps which they have converted to Swift over time to take advantage of the great language features, and have had to watch their project become molasses.

I've taken the time to write this at 19:50 on a Tuesday when I'm still in the office fixing bugs, because it's so frustrating and Apple just doesn't seem think it's a thing at all. If they didn't care about Xcode we wouldn't get all these releases, but the release keep coming and nothing gets better.

Totally agree. We work on an enterprise app and it took serveral days to update our systems, code, pods etc. Now we face with strange errors which even xcode doesn't show the error ! I see this error all around the project :

libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException

So what the hec does this mean ?! I see this problem on scrollView , buttons and so on and the only way for finding the error will be just toggle debugger mode and debug the code line by line to see where will be the problem . And at the end the error doesn't make scense at all

I found the problem ! Its due to @obj keyword for selectors. XCode was failed to refactor all the selectors and for the missing ones It makes this kind of error !

Has Apple responded to any of this?

I've had countless problems by now. Everything from breaking entire projects to annoying things like Xcode insisting on using an intentionally deleted file. Or plain stupid things like Xcode expanding the file tree of non-active projects when building in a workspace. It is an absolute pain to work in Xcode still.

XCode get's worse with every version, OS X get's worse with every version, so does iOS....

Unfortunately there is nobody out there yet to really replace Apple.

Regarding XCode: I am not able to update to 9.1. Looks like many people have the same problem:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152934/os-x-yosemite-xcode-update-stuck-on-waiting?newreg=79aa2ed9f1114e49852879a5bbe0f264

Just one of the countless problems with XCode and ItunesConnect :-/

But as I have updated iOS I have to get to version 9.1.... Apple *****!