‎Xcode (original) (raw)

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Xcode offers all the tools you need to craft great apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro, and Mac. It enables a unified workflow that spans from the earliest stages of app development to testing, debugging, optimization, and app distribution to testers and users. And with the Swift programming language, Xcode makes developing apps easy and fun.

Xcode includes a world-class code editor with an on-device machine learning model trained for Swift and Apple SDKs, a built-in preview tool that shows the UI of your app as you modify code, and a powerful debugger with conditional breakpoints.

Xcode also includes companion tools to help you rapidly prototype and test your app. Simulator enables rapid prototyping and testing your app in a simulated environment when a real device isn’t available. Instruments helps you profile and analyze your app, improve performance, and investigate system resource usage. And you can use Reality Composer Pro to create 3D content, train custom machine learning models with Create ML, and identify potential accessibility issues with Accessibility Inspector.

To test or run applications on an Apple device, all you need is a free Apple ID. To submit your apps to the App Store you must be a member of the Apple Developer Program. Some features may require Internet access and may not be available for all regions or on all Apple devices.

What’s New

Xcode 16.1 includes Swift 6 and SDKs for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, tvOS 18.1, watchOS 11.1, visionOS 2.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1.

This update provides bug fixes and improved stability, and adds support for installing individual simulator runtimes using the xcodebuild command line tool.

Ratings and Reviews

3.1 out of 5

13.2K Ratings

Great product, but suggestions...

I've been using Xcode for the past several years, I want to leave a comment that this is a great product. Although I am not sayting that the IDE itself and the graphical whatever editing tricks are great. I focus more on the frameworks, libraries, supprt, tools and the integrated package that tranforms a mac to a development machine, and Apple has consistently been great at supporting the development on OS X (macOS). The suggestion might be to provide an integrated end-to-end pakcage that becomes the ultimate development environment so I won't have to install 3rd party packaging systems, library systems, extra-IDEs for different languages, and dozens of emulation, environment, and differnet packages and dependencies for differnet tasks. Putting everything in Xocde seems a bad idea to increase the size (and responsiveness) of the software but it is much better than the overhead of doing fancy stuff and launching dozens of programs just to start working (which takes up lots of concurrency resources which a dual-core laptop I am using might not be the best choice).

Not perfect, but close enough

There are a few things I don't like about Xcode, but as a whole, it is the best totally free option for iOS development. Better yet, it is totally native. I am an amateur developer, and I have really enjoyed working on Xcode. I recommend giving it a try. The documentation is great and there are a lot of really helpful support videos from non-Apple supported persons, just trying to lend a hand.

I started, knowing nothing about Xcode or Swift, and punched out my first iOS app in less than a month. I was extremely nervous, having all my programmer friends telling me that apple was really strict when reviewing applications. I took the precautions of reading through the Apple documentation before hand, shockingly, my first application went through without a hitch and was on the App Store within 48 hours of submission.

I will admit to using an online class to learn the basics, it was very helpful in getting me familiar with the Xcode environment. I can't provide specifics since I don't know how Apple will feel about promoting someone else's work on a review.

Everything is great, except very large package

If you have 128GB of internal storage it can be very difficult to manage all of that space. There is no way to only install the features you need, as it comes with absolutely everything except iOS simulator images (those download separately). As a result, you either have to store Xcode on an external storage device or live life on the edge. Otherwise this is a truly delightful and complete IDE. Easily worth 5 stars despite its hardware requirements.

UPDATE:
It's gotten even better since Apple Silicon came out. If you're the impatient type you'll love the new Xcode because everything compiles instantly. It takes milliseconds to compile just about anything. We already know their new desktop processors have groundbreaking performance, but it really shows in Xcode. SwiftUI previews take mere milliseconds to build your whole project and produce a preview. And when you run the simulator it instantly loads your app. It's totally surreal how fast it is to develop software with Xcode.

App Privacy

The developer, Apple, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

Identifiers
Usage Data
Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

Seller

Apple Inc.

Size

2.9 GB