标签：#iOS

Transferring files and data across platforms is more straightforward than ever.

An AI agent phone is a real, or cloud-hosted, smartphone that an LLM-powered agent can operate on its own. It sees the screen, taps, swipes, types, opens apps, and completes multi-step tasks the same way a person would. Instead of calling an API, the agent uses the phone directly, the same Instagram, banking, or delivery app you'd use, driven by a model instead of a thumb. The phrase gets used two ways in 2026. Some products sell phone numbers for AI agents, voice and SMS. That's not this. Here, an AI agent phone means the device itself as something an agent controls, a full Android or iOS handset that becomes an autonomous actor. If you've heard the pitch give your AI agent a phone, this is it. Why a phone, not a browser? Most agent tooling lives in the browser, or in desktop computer use. That misses where people actually are. The world is mobile-first, and a huge share of real workflows are app-only, ride-hailing, food delivery, mobile banking, two-factor prompts, creator tools, regional super-apps. A browser agent can't install an APK, respond to a push notification, read an SMS one-time code, use the camera, or drive a native app that never ships a web build. A phone can. And there's a second reason: fidelity. When an agent operates the same app a customer uses, you're automating the real thing, not a mock, not some undocumented internal endpoint that breaks next release. How it works A mobile AI agent runs a perception-decision-action (PDA) loop against the device. The agent builds its understanding from two sources. First, the accessibility tree, the structured hierarchy of on-screen elements the OS exposes for screen readers, which gives precise, machine-readable targets. Second, vision, a screenshot passed to a multimodal model for anything the tree misses, canvas UIs, games, custom widgets. Together, the tree gives coordinates and vision gives context. The agent gets a goal in natural language, reasons about the current screen, picks the next action, and e

Turning an iOS app into a React web app is no longer the hard part. Modern coding agents can generate a convincing first version quickly. The hard part is answering three less glamorous questions: Did we discover every important screen and state? Did the generated app preserve the source behavior and data? Is the result actually close to the native UI, or does it merely look plausible? I built Grounded iOS-to-Web Harness to make those questions auditable. 🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/tiezhu0415/grounded-ios-to-web-harness What it is Grounded iOS-to-Web Harness is an experimental, lightweight grounding + verification layer for migrating iOS apps into complete, interactive, mobile-sized WebApps. Claude Code remains the primary implementer. The Harness does not prescribe the React component tree, choose a state-management library, or replace the coding agent. Instead, it establishes source facts and verifies the result against evidence from the original app. iOS source + Assets + code graph + runtime states ↓ locked source facts ↓ per-screen implementation context ↓ agent builds the React WebApp ↓ coverage + truth + behavior + critical VRT ↓ bounded repair, then human review Why prompt-only migration is not enough A prompt such as “convert this iOS app to React” can produce a good demo. But on longer tasks, an agent may miss screens, implement only one state, invent data or assets, choose navigation that differs from iOS, forget earlier facts, or optimize a screenshot while breaking real interaction. This project treats the iOS source and Assets as the truth for content and behavior, while runtime screenshots provide evidence for what the result should look like. The pipeline 1. Discover and reconcile source facts Static source inspection, codebase-memory, and necessary iOS runtime exploration are combined into machine-readable facts for screens, UI states, actions, navigation outcomes, cross-screen flows, real data and asset origins, and source confidence. Facts are l

If you are building an iOS app with Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) or Compose Multiplatform, you might have opened your generated Shared.h header at some point and wondered why it is 20,000+ lines long. I ran into this recently while optimizing one of my personal KMP apps. I kept seeing Objective-C classes generated for every single theme color, dimension constant, and internal state model, even though my Swift code never touched any of them. To get a clear picture of what was actually going on, I built a small Gradle plugin called kmprofiler . It parses the generated Objective-C header, scans your Swift source files, and highlights which exported declarations have zero call sites in Swift. The numbers on my app caught me off guard, but cleaning it up took just a few minutes. Why does Kotlin/Native export so much? In Kotlin, declarations are public by default. When targeting iOS, the Kotlin/Native compiler looks at every public class, top-level function, and property in your shared module and creates an Objective-C class interface and runtime method trampolines in the framework binary. The compiler cannot dead-strip these automatically because Objective-C relies on dynamic dispatch. It has to assume Swift or Objective-C could call them at runtime. If your UI is built with Compose Multiplatform or your Swift app only interacts with a couple of high-level bridge interfaces, most of those exported Objective-C wrappers end up being dead weight. The Audit: 459 Exports, 282 Unused When I ran kmprofiler on my app (Framed), it gave me this breakdown: ### 📊 KMP iOS Export Profile Export surface: 459 Kotlin declarations exported to Objective-C. No direct Swift call site found for 282 of them (61.4% uncalled). The unused exports mostly fell into three buckets: File Facades ( *Kt classes): Top-level properties in files like Dimens.kt (38 spacing constants) or Color.kt generated synthetic Objective-C classes like DimensKt with static getters for every single constant. Internal UI St

From halting my doomscrolls to automating air-quality checks, Apple’s streamlined Shortcuts app is my favorite iOS 27 feature.

An iOS app can feel slow even when its interface looks well-designed and responsive. The problem may not always be the UI or the code running on the device. Often, the real issues are hidden in network requests, API responses, WebSocket connections, and background activity. For developers, finding these problems requires visibility into what is happening behind the screen. This is where Owlse , a network inspection and debugging tool for iOS and macOS developers, can help. 1. What Actually Makes an iOS App Feel Slow? Several hidden network issues can affect an app's performance: Slow API responses Too many network requests Large data payloads Connection delays Failed or repeated requests Background network activity A user may simply see a loading screen or delayed response, while several network operations are happening in the background. Understanding these operations is the first step toward finding the actual cause of the problem. 2. Why Traditional Debugging Can Make These Issues Hard to Find Network-related problems are not always easy to identify through standard debugging. Developers may need to switch between different tools to inspect requests, analyze timing, investigate WebSockets, and understand application issues. When an app generates hundreds of requests, finding one problematic request can also take considerable time. Without a clear view of network activity, developers often have to rely on assumptions. A dedicated network debugging workflow can make this process much easier. 3. Meet Owlse: Network Debugging for iOS & macOS Owlse is built to give iOS and macOS developers greater visibility into their application's network activity. Instead of treating network behavior as something happening in the background, Owlse helps developers inspect and understand it. With features including live request streaming, request inspection, timing analysis, WebSocket inspection, mocking, crash reporting, search, HAR export, and timeline debugging, Owlse brings impo

"I will tear apart this forest and bring back what it took from me."

Sonos released an update to its mobile app that finally introduces support for iOS' Live Activities, giving iPhone users quick access to playback controls on their lockscreen. The added functionality is a "much requested, anticipated, and needed feature," according to a post Sonos shared to Reddit today that was spotted by 9to5Mac. While some features […]

Cloud-based AI has two persistent problems for mobile developers: latency, because every inference call is a round trip to a server, and privacy, because user data has to leave the device to be processed. By 2026, Apple has shipped enough of a native stack that bypassing the cloud entirely — architecting genuinely autonomous agents that run inference, reasoning, and action selection directly on-device — has moved from a theoretical exercise to a practical, documented architecture pattern. Why Local-First Is the 2026 Competitive Edge The clearest signal of how seriously Apple is treating this shift arrived at WWDC 2026 with Core AI, a new OS-level framework built directly into Apple Silicon. Core AI allows developers to load, specialize, and run AI models entirely on-device — including local language models up to 70 billion parameters — with zero server dependency and zero token cost. Models are automatically specialized for the hardware they run on, with ahead-of-time compilation support for fast load times. That's a meaningfully different proposition than earlier on-device AI efforts: it's Apple positioning local inference as genuinely competitive with cloud-scale models, not just a lightweight fallback for when connectivity is poor. The Three-Piece Agent SDK As of 2026, Apple effectively ships three developer-facing pieces that together form something close to a full AI agent SDK. The Foundation Models framework handles on-device inference — direct, programmatic access to the same large language model that powers Apple Intelligence itself, running on the device's Neural Engine rather than through a wrapped cloud API. App Intents exposes an app's actual capabilities to that intelligence, acting as the action layer an agent can call into. Private Cloud Compute (PCC) handles the cases that genuinely exceed on-device capacity, providing a scale fallback rather than a default path. The on-device model handles reasoning, App Intents handles action, and PCC handles scale

App Review rejected my iOS app under Guideline 2.1. The note said reviewers were unable to locate the App Tracking Transparency permission request when they tested the build. The prompt worked on my iPhone. Every single launch. It just didn't work on theirs. The cause turned out to be two properties of the ATT API that are easy to miss individually and genuinely nasty in combination: together they produce a bug that is invisible on a fast device and completely reproducible on a slow one. Your test device is fast. The reviewer's device is not necessarily. This post is the root cause, the fix I shipped, and the list of other things that silently suppress the prompt. The two facts that explain everything 1. iOS only presents the ATT prompt while your app is active Apple's documentation for requestTrackingAuthorization(completionHandler:) states, for iOS 15 and later: "Calls to the API only prompt when the application state is UIApplicationStateActive." That's UIApplication.State.active — not merely "in the foreground," and not "the code is running." During launch there is a window where your JS/UI is already executing but the app is still inactive : splash screen dismissal, the first render, a modal transition animating in or out. Call the API in that window and iOS declines to present. 2. When iOS declines to present, you don't get an error You get notDetermined back ( undetermined in expo-tracking-transparency ) — which is the exact same value you get when the user simply hasn't answered yet. There is no "I couldn't show it" signal. There is no thrown error. There is no presented: false flag. From the return value alone, "the user hasn't decided yet" and "iOS silently no-op'd your request" are indistinguishable. That's the trap. The API looks like it succeeded. The bug I shipped Reduced to its essentials: // Called during startup, while the splash screen was still going away. const { status } = await requestTrackingPermissionsAsync (); const granted = status === ' gr

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition What I Built Pawford...

"How much does it cost to put an app on the App Store" gets answered inconsistently online because most answers either only count Apple's fee, or only count hardware, or quietly assume you're renting expensive cloud infrastructure you don't actually need. Here's every cost, split into what's mandatory and what's a choice. Mandatory: Apple Developer Program — $99/year This is the one cost nobody can avoid. To submit any app to the App Store — free or paid, one app or fifty — you need an active Apple Developer Program membership, which is $99/year, billed annually, direct to Apple. There's no one-time version and no way around it. (There is a free-tier Apple ID for personal on-device testing without paying this, but it doesn't let you submit to TestFlight external testers or the App Store — for an actual public release, the $99/year membership is required.) Required, but where you have genuine choices: building and signing To submit a build, something has to run Xcode's command-line signing and archive tools — that part isn't optional. Where you have a choice is what runs it: Option Cost Recurring? Buy a Mac ~$799+ (Mac mini, entry price) No Rent a cloud Mac ~$20–100+/month Yes GitHub Actions, public repo $0 No GitHub Actions, private repo $0 up to a monthly allowance, then per-minute Only if you exceed the free allowance The short version on that last row: on a public repo, this line item can legitimately be $0, indefinitely. Optional or one-time: the things people assume cost more than they do App Store screenshots and marketing assets. You can generate these yourself for free — from the Simulator or a physical device — no paid tooling required. A physical iPhone for testing. Not strictly required to submit, but you'll want one to sanity-check the finished app before release. TestFlight itself. Free, included in the $99/year membership. App Store listing itself. Free — no fee to list an app beyond the membership. Adding it up For someone shipping a side project on a

GitHub Actions is GitHub's built-in CI/CD system — it spins up a fresh virtual machine, runs whatever commands you tell it to, and tears the machine down when it's done. It supports Linux, Windows, and macOS runners. The macOS runners are the interesting part here, because they're actual macOS machines with Xcode's command-line build tools available, which means they can build and sign iOS apps — not just run tests. The headline rule: public repos are free On a public repository, standard GitHub-hosted runner minutes — including macOS — don't cost anything, on any plan, including the free plan. It's a genuine free tier, not a trial or a limited allowance that runs out. One nuance: this covers standard runners. GitHub also offers "larger runners" (more CPU/RAM) — those are billed regardless of repo visibility. A default macOS build for signing and archiving a typical app doesn't need one, so this rarely matters in practice. What changes on a private repo If your repository is private, you get a monthly allowance of free minutes instead of unlimited free usage: Plan Included minutes / month Free 2,000 Pro 3,000 Team 3,000 The number that actually matters for iOS builds is how fast macOS runners burn through that allowance. macOS minutes cost roughly 10x GitHub applies a multiplier against your included minutes: Linux runners run at the baseline rate, macOS runners run at roughly 10x that rate. A 6-minute macOS build eats through the same allowance as roughly 60 minutes of Linux CI. Applied to the table above, a Free-plan private repo effectively gets around 200 macOS-runner-minutes worth of free build time per month before you're billed per minute past it (Pro/Team works out to roughly 300). The practical upshot: if you're fine building in the open, a public repo gets you unlimited macOS build minutes at zero cost, indefinitely. If you'd rather keep the code private, everything about the pipeline still works the same way — you're just drawing from a metered allowance

I was cleaning up the UI on a side-project iOS app and did one thing: set Dynamic Type to XXXL and screenshot every screen. Reading the code had turned up nothing. The screenshots showed problems immediately. Eleven of them, in the end. All the same cause. Here's the conclusion first. "A parent that pins things side by side" × "text that grows" is not a bug, it's a pattern. And in Japanese it breaks reliably worse than in English. English truncates. Japanese stacks vertically. Same layout, different failure depending on language. English wraps at word boundaries and, failing that, ends in … . You can't read it, but you can tell something was cut. Japanese doesn't do that. It can break between almost any two characters, so once a column is squeezed to one character wide, you get one character per line, stacked downward. Actual output: Rendered Intended Paire / d / Macs Paired Macs ( broken mid-word ) Claud / e / Code Claude Code One character per line "実行中のセッション" (Running sessions) Three step labels stacked vertically A three-step horizontal stepper De / mo , turning the capsule into a circle A "Demo" badge Paire / d / Macs is English breaking mid-word. Once the column has only a few characters left, even English gets there. Japanese gets there much earlier. The cause had the same shape every time Nearly all eleven were this: HStack { Image ( systemName : icon ) . frame ( width : 44 ) // fixed Text ( label ) Spacer () Text ( value ) // pinned right } The 44pt icon and the trailing value claim their width first, leaving the label column a few characters. The fix: rows that carry a value drop the value to the line below — but affordances like chevrons and toggles stay on the right. That row component was shared across the whole settings tree, so fixing one place fixed the entire settings screen. Which also means one decision inside a shared component was breaking eleven screens. ViewThatFits is not a general answer I used ViewThatFits to switch to a stacked layout. It

Unforgetful, the latest app from longtime indie developer Marco Arment, is designed to make reminders harder to ignore — or accidentally dismiss.

Nick DiStefano shares how Uber Eats migrated from traditional native app screens to a native-driven, single-page WebView architecture. He explains key strategies for engineering leaders and software architects looking to bypass native release cycles, manage cross-platform state, build generic native-web message bridges, and execute large-scale UI migrations without degrading metrics. By Nick DiStefano

If you build a full-screen mobile editor as a position: fixed overlay with a fixed toolbar on top and a nav bar on the bottom , iOS Safari will happily scroll your entire chrome off-screen the moment the soft keyboard opens — but only when the content is short . The fix isn't a JavaScript viewport dance. It's one line: .editor .ProseMirror { padding-bottom : 60vh ; } Give the inner scroll container something to scroll , and iOS keeps the scroll inside it instead of falling back to scrolling the document (which drags your "fixed" elements along). No html / body locking required. I hit this while building the mobile editor for PenPage , a local-first WYSIWYG markdown notes app (React + TipTap/ProseMirror). Everything below is verified on a real iOS device. The setup Picture a mobile note editor that takes over the whole screen: ┌──────────────────────────┐ │ Toolbar (absolute,top) │ ← stays put ├──────────────────────────┤ │ │ │ Editable content │ ← scrolls │ (overflow-y: auto) │ │ │ ├──────────────────────────┤ │ Nav bar (absolute,bottom)│ ← stays put └──────────────────────────┘ The outer container is position: fixed; inset: 0 . The toolbar and nav bar are position: absolute inside it. The middle is the only thing that scrolls. Standard app-shell layout. Works great on desktop and Android. The symptom Tap into the editor, the iOS keyboard slides up, and: Long document (taller than the viewport): perfect. The content scrolls under the keyboard, the toolbar and nav bar stay nailed in place. Short document (shorter than the viewport): broken. Trying to scroll drags the whole screen — toolbar and nav bar included — as if the entire fixed overlay were a normal scrolling page. That "only when short" detail is the whole story. The root cause This is the long tail of WebKit bug #191204 : when the soft keyboard appears, iOS Safari's layout viewport gets shorter than the visual viewport , and the document itself becomes scrollable by the keyboard's height. Worse, in that stat

Every dev course teaches you to build the app. Almost none teach you how to actually ship it. I found that out the hard way on my first job — no signing, no publish, no exceptions. So I wrote the full setup, both platforms, both ways: → Android: keystore via CLI and Android Studio's GUI → iOS: manual signing (certs, App IDs, provisioning profiles) AND automatic signing → The exact steps before every archive/build Full walkthrough → https://medium.com/@smitp7502/from-keystore-to-app-store-understanding-code-signing-for-android-ios-30671b5fd2a2 flutter #android #ios #mobiledev

If you're testing an iOS build with real devices, you've got two main paths: Apple's TestFlight, or Expo's EAS Preview using Ad-Hoc provisioning. They solve the same problem — getting a build onto a real iPhone without the App Store — but the workflows are genuinely different, not just cosmetically. How each one works TestFlight uses Apple's official infrastructure. You upload your build to App Store Connect (often via npx testflight to speed this up), Apple processes/reviews it, and testers install the TestFlight app and accept an email or public link invite. No UDID collection needed — Apple handles device registration behind the scenes. Expo EAS Preview (Ad-Hoc) uses Ad-Hoc provisioning. You register each tester's device UDID against your Apple Developer account before building — either manually (eas device:create, eas device:list) or by having the tester scan a QR code that installs a temporary profile. Once devices are tied to your provisioning profile, you build with: bash eas build --platform ios --profile preview This generates a direct install link/QR code — no App Store account or TestFlight app required. Comparison table Feature Expo Preview / Ad-Hoc Apple TestFlight Device limit ~100 devices/device class/year (Apple Developer account tier) Up to 10,000 external testers Processing time Immediate after cloud build finishes Apple review/processing (mins to hours) UDID management Manual or profile-based registration required Not required, handled by Apple Best for Fast internal testing, client demos, strict ad-hoc distribution Larger-scale beta testing, staging before production Which one should you use? Fast internal iteration, client demos, small teams → Ad-Hoc. No waiting on Apple, instant install links. Wider beta testing before a production release → TestFlight. Built-in scale, no manual device management. Most teams I've worked with end up using both at different stages: Ad-Hoc during active development for quick feedback loops, TestFlight once the bui

I keep seeing the same mismatch in the screen-time category: a lot of apps are technically blockers, but they feel like parental control software. That is fine if a parent is the customer. It is a bad fit if the user is an adult trying to manage their own habits. The difference is not cosmetic. When a blocker feels like surveillance, adults bounce. They do not want an account, a dashboard, or the feeling that their phone behavior is being watched somewhere else. That is the gap I built SproutGuard for: built for adults blocking themselves , not kids runs on-device through Apple's Screen Time APIs no account no server no usage data leaving the phone App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sproutguard-screen-time-detox/id6768664921?ct=devto-adults I also put the positioning plainly on the product page: self-control, not parental control The hard lesson from launching it is that being right about the problem is not the same thing as being shareable . Privacy architecture matters, but users rarely tell friends about architecture. What they do share is something emotional or visible: a streak, a mascot, a challenge, a before/after feeling. So the current working question for me is not "how do I explain on-device privacy better?" It is: How do you make a self-control product feel human enough that people talk about it? Website: https://shantj.github.io/sproutguard/ If you've worked on consumer productivity or habit products, I'm interested in what actually made users talk about them.