Two of the most-upvoted threads on r/iOSProgramming this month say the same thing in different words: “I miss the programming aspect of iOS programming” and “Why would anyone start a new app today?”. The complaint underneath both is not really about LLMs. It is about signal. The phrase “iOS developer” used to mean someone who…
How to plan for the iOS 27 SDK cliff: Liquid Glass, size classes, and Reality Composer Pro migrations
Apple’s annual SDK cycle keeps shipping silent breaking changes. The UIDesignRequiresCompatibility plist key is honored on Xcode 26 builds and ignored on Xcode 27 builds. iOS 27 collapses iPhone horizontal size classes to compact, breaking ten years of storyboard constraint variations with no runtime warning. Reality Composer Pro 3 imports projects from RCP 2 with…
How to survive Xcode 26 and 27 regressions: IB gutters, beta-OS crashes, AI pane, and orphaned simulators
Xcode 26.4 silently broke Interface Builder for Objective-C projects. Xcode 26 crashes with EXC_BAD_ACCESS the moment you launch onto an iOS 27 beta device. Xcode 27’s new Coding Assistant opens conversations in a floating window instead of next to your code. And nobody’s Mac can delete the 9–85 GB of orphaned simulator runtime sitting under…
How to launch an indie iOS app when discovery is broken and Apple can Sherlock you
There are roughly 2,000 new apps released on the App Store every day. Apple Ads charges $10–20 per paying user in competitive categories. And Apple just demoed on-device food recognition in iOS 27’s camera app, wiping out the differentiation of every calorie photo app in one keynote slide. The follow-up Reddit thread, “Why would anyone…
How to structure an ARKit/SceneKit game
A practical guide to separating game logic, scene management, and entities in an ARKit/SceneKit iOS game using GameplayKit’s entity-component system.
How to defend a shipping app against iOS 26 and 27 beta regressions
Your HealthKit completion handler reports success = YES, but no permission was ever granted. UserDefaults.standard.integer(forKey:) crashes inside App.init(). A system extension that worked all last year now fails with errno 13 for half your customers. These are not edge cases — they are real regressions that shipped in iOS 26.5 and iOS 27 beta 1,…
How to load local HTML files in WKWebView on iOS and macOS
Since iOS 13, loading local HTML via WKWebView requires the purpose-built loadFileURL(_:allowingReadAccessTo:) API. This post covers the correct approach, how to handle inter-page navigation including the /nextPage sandbox trap, and when to use WKURLSchemeHandler for same-origin-sensitive apps.