Having previously done some back-end and Android development in IntelliJ, switching to Xcode when I switched to iOS development felt sort of like going from Microsoft Word to TextEdit. However, Xcode does have many limitations and issues that cause work to progress significantly slower, and with significantly more annoyance, than it could have, and that it does on other platforms.

It's the only IDE available for performing all the tasks needed to make native apps for this highly lucrative market, so we use it, we get paid and learn how to make the best of it. It does the job and the code gets written. To literally answer the question, Xcode is obviously not actually so bad as to prevent work from being done in the end. Also having configuration in the non-human-readable project file instead of just separate config files (and with Xcode 13 it seems Apple is trying to move even more into the project file). Using a weird mapping of files in Xcode to files in the file system causing constant merge conflicts in the project file instead of just using what’s in the file system (as if being able to organize files in Xcode differently from the file system is a desirable feature and not just plain confusing). Was very excited for SwiftUI Previews but they take like 5 minutes to boot up and then it’s hit or miss whether they actually work. There is the Swift language server but that doesn’t work for iOS projects or at least mixed Swift/ObjC.Īpple has made Xcode extensions nearly useless and hard to develop.īuild caching is not sound so I often have to do clean builds or even clear derived data on occasion. I wish the iOS tool chain was separate from Xcode so that we could use any editor.

In a large projects it’s very unresponsive, clicking between files, moving the cursor, etc.

Download xcode for mac older version