Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

Schiendelman

I've been using essentially this process (with Claude Code) for about six months. There are a couple of places where I've opened xcode; mostly to update the simulators for new betas of xcode 27, and once to add a target for Apple Watch (and I think something for HealthKit). Interestingly, since about Opus 4.6, Claude has been able to reason its way into this process on its own. It was clunky until 4.7, and in 4.8 it's managed to find its way around every reason I had to open xcode myself.

Tiberium

It's kind of funny to be reading this: > I had Claude Code create mine: I told Claude, more or less: I want to archive, Developer ID-sign, notarize, staple, and install this app to /Applications without ever opening Xcode. Write me a script that does the whole chain and fails loudly if any step breaks. Even though the text we're reading is Claude talking to us as well :) Also it was weird to see the mention of "ask your LLM" at almost every stage in the blog post: > point Claude Code or your LLM coding tool of choice to this blog post, and let it figure it out > When in doubt, ask your LLM of choice about them and have it help you get set up. It’s the one that’s going to be using Xcode for you anyway. > The whole point of using the LLM in the first place is to avoid doing things manually that you don’t want to do. > Again, if in doubt, ask Claude Code or your LLM of choice to create this for you. > Again, this is why you talk to your LLM, tell it what you want, and have it help build your workflow.

sgt

Although this has been well known for years and documented.

LatencyKills

I spent seven years as a dev on the Xcode team and this is pretty much my exact workflow these days.

mrbombastic

This is cool but also makes me worried about the tendency with llms for all of us to make bespoke solutions rather than building a better community tool or extending an existing tool to solve the problem. fastlane exists to solve exactly this problem in the mobile space.

recsv-heredoc

Having to have Xcode installed is more than half the problem. It makes Visual Studio look lightweight.

CharlesW

If it's okay to mention my own complementary open source project, Axiom¹ does a good job of helping coding harnesses know how to do this effectively for Apple OS development. In addition to a deep roster of skills and agencts, Axiom includes several for-LLM tools². xclog , xcprof , xcsym , and xcui are designed to be used by LLMs, and expose capabilities in a token-efficient way. These tools are equally helpful for non-Axiom skills/agents. ¹ Axiom: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ ² Axiom CLI tools: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/tools/

schainks

I just set up my pipeline to do this exact thing for both the Apple and Android ecosystems, dispatching loads to my mac studio or Linux box accordingly. I moved the runners off GitHub because uptime for GitHub actions has been trash lately, and the Apple Silicon runners are pricey. Claude was great at figuring out what was broken when and either fixing it, or clicking as far as it could until it needed me. You could say I'm mostly just IRL hands for the AI now.

hyperhello

Being outside of the approved development loop has rough edges. How do you keep the app from putting up that permission to access documents folder all the time while you rebuild it?

rvz

By using "Claude Code"* * and giving Anthropic all your secrets, env vars, certificates and your source code to them.

stephenhuey

Thought this was going to be about the new Ruby Native! https://rubynative.com “From bundle install to your phone in minutes. To the App Store and Google Play without a line of native code.“

saagarjha

Making your app buildable from the CLI is not something I do personally to use on my Mac but it is very useful when you're automating your CI. If you have GitHub Actions set up to build your app, so can Claude, assuming you have the right signing setup on your machine.

pupppet

Doesn't that mean you need to distribute the app (TestFlight) before you can preview your app? How do you test locally without the simulators?

overgard

Oh god, the app store does not need more slop. If you can't be bothered to open XCode (which I agree is a dumpster fire, but), you shouldn't be bothered to submit an app that a person has to review and another person has to filter out of their search results.

exographicskip

Skimmed the article. Pretty close to my workflow using fastlane with tauri. Useful sanity check!

kxxx

I've been building and testing my iOS app just for fun via Linux only. Surprisingly, it's very easy. This works like a charm: https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool You do not need to upload to TestFlight or the App Store; you can just install the app locally to your iPhone via usb -- even from Linux! When in doubt, just ask your coding agent of choice to help you create and upload a Hello World iOS app. It's really easy.

hyzyla

Check also Sweetpad CLI. It’s basically wrapper around xcodebuild, but humans and agents. It’s my next project after Sweetpad VSCode extension for developing iOS/Swift applications in VSCode. Cli is still in beta, but I see on my own project that it’s already quite pleasant to use 1. https://sweetpad.hyzyla.dev/ 2. https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad

tdhz77

I do something similar in GitHub actions. Every new app is setup in a few minutes to star getting rejected by iOS and Android.

josefrichter

Wait, I am not aware that I've done ANY of those setup steps, yet I'm building iOS and macOS apps without XCode. Both Claude and Codex handle it just fine and didn't ask me for any setup steps.

datadrivenangel

I've built a few small MacOS dock widgets now by just telling Claude/OpenCode to build them. Works well enough if you're very explicit. The most useful one is a little weather sparkline to show local temperature forecasts. Useful every day.