Apple Archive
There’s been endless talk online about just how bad Apple’s graphical user interface design has become over the years, culminating in the introduction of Liquid Glass across all of the company’s operating systems this year. Despite all the gnawing of teeth and scathing think pieces before the final rollout, it seems the average Apple user simply doesn’t care as much about GUI design as Apple bloggers thought they did, as there hasn’t been any uproar or stories in local media about how you should hold off on updating your iPhone. The examples of just how bad Apple’s GUI design has become keep on coming, though. This time it’s Howard Oakley showing once again how baffling the macOS UI is these days. If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to the interface changes brought in macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed. When 26.1 followed on 3 November it had only regressed, and 26.2 has done nothing. Here I summarise my opinions on where Tahoe’s overhaul has gone wrong. ↫ Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company Apple bloggers and podcasters are hell-bent on blaming Apple’s terrible GUI design over the past 10 years on one man. Their first target was Jony Ive, who was handed control over not just hardware design, but also software design in 2012. When he left Apple, GUI design at Apple would finally surely improve again, and the Apple bloggers and podcasters let out a sigh of relief. History would turn out different, though – under Ive’s successor, Alan Dye, Apple’s downward trajectory in this area would continue unabated, culminating in the Liquid Glass abomination. Now that Alan Dye has left Apple, history is repeating itself: the very same Apple bloggers and podcasters are repeating themselves – surely now that Alan Dye is gone, GUI design at Apple will finally surely improve again. The possibility that GUI design at Apple does not hinge on the whims of just one person, but that instead the entire company has lost all sense of taste and craftmanship in this area does not cross their minds. Everyone around Jony Ive and Alan Dye, both below, alongside, and above them, had to sign off on Apple’s recent direction in GUI design, and the idea that the entire company would blindly follow whatever one person says, quality be damned, would have me far more worried as an Apple fan. At this point, it’s clear that Apple’s inability to design and build quality user interfaces is not the fault of just one fall guy, but an institutional problem. Anyone expecting a turnaround just because Ive Dye is gone isn’t seeing the burning forest through the trees.
Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each. I have no experience with (or interest in) a Vision Pro, so I can’t comment on Liquid Glass in visionOS. ↫ Adam Engst at TidBITS An incredibly detailed article showing exactly how to change the relevant settings, and exactly what they do, for each of Apple’s relevant platforms. I have a feeling quite a few of you will want to bookmark this one.
With iOS 26, Apple seems to be leaning harder into visual design and decorative UI effects — but at what cost to usability? At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way. Let’s strip back the frost and look at how these changes affect real use. ↫ Raluca Budiu I have not yet used Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” graphical user interface design, so here’s the usual disclaimer that my opinions are, then, effectively meaningless. That being said, the amount of detailed articles about the problems with Liquid Glass – from bugs to structural design problems – are legion, and this article by Raluca Budiu is an excellent example. There are so many readability problems, spacing issues, odd animations that don’t actually convey anything meaningful, performance issues, and tons of bugs. It feels like it was made not by user interface specialists, but by marketeers, who were given too little time to boot. It feels incoherent and messy, and it’s going to take Apple a long, long time to mold and shape it into something remotely workable.
Your lovely host, late last night: Google claims they won’t be sharing developer information with governments, but we all know that’s a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant after whatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose the genocide in Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, you probably should not, and stick to more anonymous organising tools. ↫ Thom Holwerda Let’s check in with how that other walled garden Google is trying to emulate is doing. Apple has removed ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to monitor and report the location of immigration enforcement officers, from the App Store. “We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” Apple said in a statement to Business Insider. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.” ↫ Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, Peter Kafka, and Kwan Wei Kevin Tan for Business Insider Oh. Apple and Google are but mere extensions of the state apparatus. Think twice about what device you bring with you the next time you wish to protest your government’s actions.
It’s release day for all of Apple’s operating systems, so if you’re fully or only partway into the ecosystem, you’ve got some upgrades ahead of you. Version 26 for macOS, iOS and iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and HomePod Software have all been released today, so if you own any device running any of these operating system, it’s time to head on over to the update section of the settings application and wait for that glass to slowly and sensually liquefy all over your screens. Do put a sock on the doorknob.
We often focus on Google’s detrimental effects on the web, but in doing so, we often tend to forget the other major player who is quite possibly even more damaging to the web than Google can even dream to be. Without a counterweight, network effects allow successful tech firms to concentrate wealth and political influence. This power allows them to degrade potential competitive challenges, enabling rent extraction for services that would otherwise be commodities. This mechanism operates through (often legalised) corruption of judicial, regulatory, and electoral systems. When left to fester, it corrodes democracy itself. Apple has deftly used a false cloak of security and privacy to move the internet, and web in particular, toward enclosure and irrelevance. This post makes the case for why Apple should be considered a corrupted, and indeed incompetent, autocrat in our digital lives. It continues to abusing a unique form of monopoly to extract rents, including on the last remnants of open ecosystems it tolerates. Worse, Apple’s centralisation through the App Store entrenches the positions of peer big tech firms, harming the prospects of competitors in turn. Apple have been, over the course of many years, poisonous to internet standards and the moral commitments of that grand project. ↫ Alex Russell at Infrequently Noted I have nothing more to add.
With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle became slightly more rounded, and Apple eliminated the ability for icon elements to extend beyond the icon rectangle (as seen in the current icons for GarageBand, Photo Booth, Dictionary, etc.). With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS’s design, I wanted to begin a collection chronicling the evolution of the system icons over the years. I’ve been rolling these out on social media over the past week and will continue to add to and update this collection slowly over the summer. Enjoy! ↫ BasicAppleGuy Every single one of these icons is getting progressively worse with almost every design change. They go from beautifully crafted, easily readable and supremely distinguishable icons to generic, repetitive blobs of colour, void of any personality, artistry, or usability considerations. Also, Apple’s new icon design language makes the icons look fuzzy, like they’re not being rendered properly. It’s very unnerving. The one exception is probably the generic folder icon, which looks fine in all of its incarnations. Then there’s the classic Platinum, pixelated version from Mac OS 9 and earlier, which, together with icons from Windows and BeOS from the same time period, are a whole different style that I don’t think most people would accept anymore these days, but that I absolutely adore. Mostly I’m just sad that the craft of making exquisite icons for operating systems is dying, replaced by what almost look like “AI” generated blobs of indeterminate meaning, that rely more on preexisting knowledge of the operating system and its applications in question than on being recognisable and decipherable by anyone. I truly hope Windows and the various open source desktops don’t follow in Apple’s footsteps here.
The world isn’t short of classic Macintosh emulators, but one more certainly cannot hurt. Snow emulates classic (Motorola 680×0-based) Macintosh computers. It features a graphical user interface to operate the emulated machine and provides extensive debugging capabilities. The aim of this project is to emulate the Macintosh on a hardware-level as much as possible, as opposed to emulators that patch the ROM or intercept system calls. It currently emulates the Macintosh 128K, Macintosh 512K, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh SE, Macintosh Classic and Macintosh II. ↫ Snow’s homepage Snow is written in Rust and open source under the MIT license.
For years now – it feels more like decades, honestly – Apple has been trying a variety of approaches to make the iPad more friendly to power users, most notably by introducing, and subsequently abandoning, various multitasking models. After its most recent attempts – Stage Manager – fell on deaf ears, the company has thrown its hands up in the air and just implemented what we all wanted on the iPad anyway: a normal windowing environment. Apple today revealed an overhaul of iPad multitasking, introducing a completely new windowing system, a macOS-style Menu Bar, a pointer, and more. The centerpiece of the multitasking improvements is a new macOS-style windowing system. Apps still launch in full-screen by default, preserving the familiar iPad experience, but users can now resize apps into windows using a new grab handle. If an app was previously used in a windowed state, it will remember that layout and reopen the same way next time. ↫ Hartley Charlton at MacRumors The new window manager includes tiling features, Exposé, support for multiple displays, and swiping twice on the home button will minimise all open windows. It’s literally the macOS way of managing windows transplanted onto the iPad, with some small affordances for touch input. This is excellent news, and should make the multitasking features of the iPad, which, at this point, is as powerful as a MacBook, much more accessible and effortless than all those hidden gesture-based features from before. The amount of RAM in your iPad seems to determine how many active windows you can have open before the older ones get put to sleep, from four on the oldest iPad Pro models, to many more on the most recent models. Any windows above that limit will still be visible, but will just be a screenshot of their most recent state until you interact with them again. Any windows above a limit of twelve will be pushed to the recents screen instead. In addition, and almost just as important, iPadOS 26 also introduces proper background processes, allowing applications to actually keep running in the background instead of being put to sleep. Anyone who has ever done any serious work on an iPad that involves long processes like exporting a video will consider this a godsend. Now all we need is a proper terminal and Xcode and the iPad can be a real computer.
Apple at WWDC announced iOS 26, introducing a comprehensive visual redesign built around its new “Liquid Glass” concept, alongside expanded Apple Intelligence capabilities, updates to core communication apps, and more. Liquid Glass is a translucent material that reflects and refracts surroundings to create dynamic, responsive interface elements, according to Apple. The new design language transforms the Lock Screen, where the time fluidly adapts to available space in wallpapers, and spatial scenes add 3D effects when users move their iPhone. Meanwhile, app icons and widgets gain new customization options, including a striking clear appearance. ↫ Tim Hardwick at MacRumors Apple also posted a video on YouTube where you can see the new design language in motion, which gives a bit of a better idea of what it’s actually like. Of course, before you believe anyone who’s writing about this new Liquid Glass design language, the only true way to form a coherent opinion of a user interface is through usage, so keep that in mind. Looking at the video, the good part that immediately jumps out at me about this Liquid Glass stuff is the animations informing you where stuff is coming from and where it’s going. These are the sort of affordances I was writing about almost 20 years ago, when Compiz’ animations and effects made windows and virtual desktops feel like “real” objects that had a physical presence in a space. Apple’s Liquid Glass seems to have the same effect, and I’m here for it. The transparency, though, I’m not a huge fan of. Depending on the content shown beneath the glass user interface elements, contrast can suffer, making things incredibly hard to read. While the glassy refraction effects looks neat, I would’ve much rather seen a focus on blurred glass, which makes a lack of contrast much less likely to occur. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of screenshots, videos, and thinkpieces about how this much transparency is going to hurt readability. I love it when an operating system gets a design language overhaul, and in this case, Apple is applying it across the board, to all of its operating systems. This may be the perfect moment for me to grit my teeth, hold my nose, and get my hands on a Mac just so I can write about Liquid Glass once it lands.
Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now. Now, let’s go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander’s AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won’t run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we’ll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There’s no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we’ll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We’ll even test it on one of IBM’s PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should. ↫ Cameron Kaiser Excellent reading, as always, from Cameron Kaiser.
The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26,” said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26. Apple is making the change to bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers. Today’s operating systems — including iOS 18, watchOS 12, macOS 15 and visionOS 2 — use different numbers because their initial versions didn’t debut at the same time. ↫ Mark Gurman at Bloomberg OK.
Let’s dive into a peculiar bug in iOS. And by that I mean, let’s follow along as Guilherme Rambo dives into a peculiar bug in iOS. The bug is that, if you try to send an audio message using the Messages app to someone who’s also using the Messages app, and that message happens to include the name “Dave and Buster’s”, the message will never be received. ↫ Guilherme Rambo As I read this first description of the bug, I had no idea what could possibly be causing this. However, once Rambo explained that every audio message is transcribed by Apple into a text version, I immediately assumed what was going on: that “and” is throwing up problems because the actual name of the brand is stylised with an ampersand, isn’t it? It’s always DNS HTML, isn’t it? Yes. Yes it is. MessagesBlastDoorService uses MBDXMLParserContext (via MBDHTMLToSuperParserContext) to parse XHTML for the audio message. Ampersands have special meaning in XML/HTML and must be escaped, so the correct way to represent the transcription in HTML would have been "Dave & Buster's". Apple’s transcription system is not doing that, causing the parser to attempt to detect a special code after the ampersand, and since there’s no valid special code nor semicolon terminating what it thinks is an HTML entity, it detects an error and stops parsing the content. ↫ Guilherme Rambo It must be somewhat of a relief to programmers and developers the world over that even a company as large and filled with talented people as Apple can run into bugs like this.
A few months ago I shared my Swift SDK for Darwin, which allows you to build iOS Swift Packages on Linux, amongst other things. I mentioned that a lot of work still needed to be done, such as handling codesigning, packaging, and bundling. I’m super excited to share that we’ve finally reached the point where all of these things are now possible with cross-platform, open source software. Enter, xtool! This means it’s finally possible to build and deploy iOS apps from Linux and Windows (WSL). At the same time, xtool is SwiftPM-based and fully declarative, which means you can also use it to replace Xcode on macOS for building iOS software! ↫ kabiroberai While this is obviously an impressive piece of engineering that’s taken countless years to fully put together, the issue this doesn’t address are Apple’s licensing terms when it comes to Xcode and development for Apple’s platforms. The Apple Developer Program License Agreement clearly forbids installing Xcode and the Apple SDK on non-Apple branded devices, and as this new xtool requires you download Xcode.xip and use it, it seems it violates these terms. Now, as far as I’m concerned, these terms are idiotic and should be 100% illegal, but if you’re an Apple developer who relies on your Apple developer account to make money, using a tool like this definitely has the potential to put your developer account at risk. For experimentation, sure, this is great, but for any official work I would be quite weary until Apple makes some sort of statement about the matter, which is highly unlikely to happen. Perhaps the courts can, at some point, have a say here – especially in the EU – but even then, Apple can always find or manufacture some reason to terminate your account if they really want to. If you want to develop on your own terms, perhaps developing for Apple platforms is not what you should be doing.
We present the formal verification of Apple’s iMessage PQ3, a highly performant, device-to-device messaging protocol offering strong security guarantees even against an adversary with quantum computing capabilities. PQ3 leverages Apple’s identity services together with a custom, post-quantum secure initialization phase and afterwards it employs a double ratchet construction in the style of Signal, extended to provide post-quantum, post-compromise security. We present a detailed formal model of PQ3, a precise specification of its fine-grained security properties, and machine-checked security proofs using the TAMARIN prover. Particularly novel is the integration of post-quantum secure key encapsulation into the relevant protocol phases and the detailed security claims along with their complete formal analysis. Our analysis covers both key ratchets, including unbounded loops, which was believed by some to be out of scope of symbolic provers like TAMARIN (it is not!). ↫ Felix Linker and Ralf Sasse Weekend, light reading, you know how this works by now. Light some candles, make some tea, get comfy.
John Siracusa, one third of the excellent ATP podcast, developer of several niche Mac utilities, and author of some of the best operating system reviews of all time, has called for Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to step down. Now, countless people call for Tim Cook to stand down all the time, but when someone like Siracusa, an ardent Mac user since the release of the very first Macintosh and a staple of the Apple community, makes such a call, it carries a bit more weight. His main argument is not particularly surprising to anyone who’s been keeping tabs on the Apple community, and the Apple developer community in particular: Apple seems to no longer focus on making great products, but on making money. Every decision made by Apple’s leadership team is focused solely on extracting as much money from consumers and developers, instead of on making the best possible products. The best leaders can change their minds in response to new information. The best leaders can be persuaded. But we’ve had decades of strife, lawsuits, and regulations, and Apple has stubbornly dug in its heels even further at every turn. It seems clear that there’s only one way to get a different result. In every healthy entity, whether it’s an organization, an institution, or an organism, the old is replaced by the new: CEOs, sovereigns, or cells. It’s time for new leadership at Apple. The road we’re on now does not lead anywhere good for Apple or its customers. It’s springtime, and I’m choosing to believe in new life. I swear it’s not too late. ↫ John Siracusa I reached this same point with Apple a long, long time ago. I was an ardent Mac user during the PowerPC G4 and G5 days, lasting into the early Intel days. However, as the iPhone and related services took over as Apple’s primary source of income, I felt that Mac OS X, which I once loved and enjoyed so much, started to languish, and it’s been downhill for Apple’s desktop operating system ever since. Whenever I have to help my parents with their computers – modern M1 and M2 Macs – I am baffled and saddened by just how big of a convoluted, disjointed, and unintuitive mess macOS has become. I long ago stopped caring about whatever products Apple releases or updates, because I feel like as a user who genuinely cares about his computing experience, Apple simply doesn’t make products for me. I’m not sure replacing Tim Cook with someone else will really change anything about Apple’s priorities; in the end, it’s a publicly traded corporation that thinks it needs to please shareholders, and a focus on great products instead of money isn’t going to help with that. Apple long ago stopped being the beleaguered company many of its most ardent fans still seem convinced that it is, and it’s now one of those corporate monoliths that can make billions more overnight by squeezing just a bit more out of developers or users, regardless of what that squeezing does to the user experience. Apple is still selling more devices than ever, and it’s still raking in more gambling gains through digital slot machines for children, and as long as that’s the case, replacing Tim Cook won’t do a goddamn thing.
Way back in 2021, in the Epic v. Apple court case, judge US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered Apple to allow third-party developers to tell users how to make payments inside iOS applications without going through Apple’s App Store. As we have come to expect from Apple, the company maliciously complied, lowering the commission on purchases outside of its ecosystem from 30% to 27%, while also adding a whole bunch of hoops and hurdles, like scare screens with doom-and-gloom language to, well, scare consumers into staying within Apple’s ecosystem for in-app payments. Well, it turns out Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious, giving Apple, Tim Cook, and its other executives what can only be described as a beatdown – even highlighting how one of Apple’s executives, under orders from Tim Cook, lied under oath several times. Gonzalez is referring this to the District Attorney for Northern California “to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.” In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate. ↫ US District Judge Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Gonzalez’ entire ruling is scathing, seething with rage, and will probably do more reputational damage to Apple, Tim Cook, and his executive team than any bendgate or antennagate could ever do. Judge Gonzalez: This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases. Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple. ↫ US District Judge Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Gonzalez effectively destroyed any ability for Apple to charge commissions on purchases made inside iOS applications but outside Apple’s App Store, and this order will definitely find its way to the European Union as well, where it will serve as further evidence of Tim Cook’s and Apple’s continuous, never-ending contempt for the law and courts that uphold it. For its part, Apple has stated they’re going to appeal. Good luck with that.
The fines weren’t the only Digital Markets Act news coming from this fine continent today. The European Commission also closed its investigation into Apple’s user choice obligations under the DMA, and while Apple has made good progress in a few areas, the EC states Apple is still acting illegally in a variety of others. First, the good news for Apple: the European Commission is happy with Apple’s changes regarding browser choice, the ability to remove preinstalled iOS applications, and the ability to change a whole bunch of default settings that are all locked outside of the EU. These are valuable and welcome changes, and I’m glad the European Union, the European Parliament, and the Commission have forced Apple to become less hostile to European consumers. Second, there’s the bad news for Apple. Under the DMA, Apple is obligated to allow for third-party application stores, and the ability for users to download and install applications directly from the internet. In this area, Apple is still breaking European Union law. The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple’s Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers’ ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels. ↫ European Commission press release This outcome was entirely expected, and pretty much everyone – except Apple’s PR attack dogs – knew Apple’s malicious compliance, fees, and onerous hurdles were going to be a hard sell. I’m glad the European Commission seems unimpressed with Trump’s sabre-rattling about the EU’s consumer protection laws, and is continuing to whip US tech companies in line, making sure they stop violating our consumer protection laws. Since these are the outcomes of a preliminary investigation, Apple now has the chance to argue its case.
Yep. I regret to inform you all that, as of January 2025, I am a Mac user: I bought a Mac. I have betrayed the penguin. So, how did such an icon of early 2000s Apple fall into my grubby hands? Well, it all started with the Wii U. I’m not joking. ↫ Loganius That’s one heck of an excuse to get a PowerPC G4 – needing to do Linux kvm hacking to fix a bug. While getting the PowerMac G4 they bought all set up and working properly for development purposes, someone else fixed the bug in question in the meantime. Such is the way of open source development. Regardless, as far as classic computers go, PowerPC Macs are a great way to enter the wider hobby of retrocomputing. They’re widely available, incredibly cheap, and offer a ton of variety when it comes to supported operating systems, working with everything from classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, from Linux to the BSDs, down to more exotic awesome stuff like MorphOS. Their popularity also ensures a steady stream of replacement parts, expertise, and community support. I have a 1.25Ghz 17″ PowerBook G4 for MorphOS, and a snow white iBook G3 for Mac OS 9.2.2, and I’ll never get rid of them.
I’ve saved the worst for last. For some reason, Xcode phones home to appstoreconnect.apple.com every time I open an Xcode project. This also appears to be unnecessary, and I experience no problems after denying the connections in Little Snitch, so I do! I assume that the connections send identifying information about the Xcode project to Apple, otherwise why even make the connections when opening a project? And all of these connections from Xcode, to every domain, require login to your Apple Developer account, so Apple is definitely receiving identifying information about you in any case. In effect, Xcode is a developer analytics collection mechanism, whether you like it or not, which I don’t. ↫ Jeff Johnson If, at this point in time, you’re still surprised Apple doesn’t practice what it preaches, the fault lies pretty much entirely with you. Anyway, it seems Xcode phones home to Apple quite a bit, which I doubt is all that unique in the world of commercial development environments. I honestly don’t think Apple itself doing anything particularly nefarious with this data, but the fact it’s collecting it in the first place should still make you think twice about using Xcode, especially if you’re developing anything even remotely sensitive. What should really worry you is the fact Tim Cook and Apple are close allies of Trump and his regime. Xcode is required for iOS/iPadOS/etc. development, because the App Store requires applications be built and submitted with it. As such, every iOS developer is sending substantial amounts of data to Apple during development, which should be especially concerning for people outside of the US and people who aren’t straight white males; using Xcode requires an Apple Account, so Apple knows quite a bit about who is using it. With the breakdown of the rule of law in the US, all of this data is basically freely accessible to US authorities, and we’ve seen by now that people like self-styled genius Elon Musk don’t worry too much about pesky things like the rule of law. If Musk wants this data, Apple will hand it over. If you’re an Apple developer, you should stop and think every time you open Xcode. You’re sending your data straight to a hostile entity. If you’re claiming to use Apple products because of Apple’s privacy “promises”, Xcode’s data collection should be a huge worry for you.
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