I’ve been using Xcode since 2011, when Xcode 4 had just been released. Those were turbulent times, with Xcode 3 and Interface Builder having previously been two different applications, and Xcode 4.0 was the first “one app does all” approach to building iOS and macOS apps.

I remember Apple bringing out incremental upgrades every few weeks, with the jump from Xcode 4.1 to 4.2 being quite a leap in regards to features and/or the way you had to do things, coinciding with the release of iOS 5 and iCloud.

I’m telling you, turbulent times.

Xcode 4.3 was the first release to be distributed via the Mac App Store instead of a ZIP file from a hidden section in the Developer Portal. Upgrading wasn’t always easy slash possible, and I had more than one new version that just didn’t want to replace the existing one. Beta versions could still be installed side by side with the “release” version from the App Store, but the latter was from now on the only way to submit apps to the App Store.

Xcode 4 stayed with us for a while and let us program anything and everything up until iOS 6.1 and macOS Lion, until June 2013 when Xcode 5 was introduced. From when on, Apple chose to increment Xcode version numbers with each passing year until now, in late 2018, when we’ll soon be submitting our apps with Xcode 10 (which I haven’t even tried out yet).

I have to be brutally honest with you when I say that Xcode 5 was probably my most favourite release out of all the versions there have been. But I kept upgrading to Xcode 6, 7 and 8, being a little underwhelmed by how much more stuff Apple were trying to cram into their IDE every year. Poor Xcode!

With Xcode 6 came a new logo as well as Swift, which changed major versions what felt like every 12 seconds, and code from last week wouldn’t work anymore when used with a minor version update a week later. What a disaster! We also got Playgrounds and some more monitoring tools to play with, and – although clunky and frustrating to this day – Apple tried their best to make those evil provisioning profiles as automated and easy as possible.

When Xcode started turning into a buggy nightmare

There came the point at which the reviews on the App Store for our favourite IDE have been getting less and less kind. I remember the first bad reviews flying in when people had issues upgrading their version of Xcode. That was the most common complaint during the Xcode 6 and 7 era. Other than that, people seemed more or less happy with their development tools. Continue reading →