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.

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.

Although this has been well known for years and documented.

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

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.

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

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/

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.

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?

By using "Claude Code"*

* and giving Anthropic all your secrets, env vars, certificates and your source code to them.

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.“

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.

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?

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.

Skimmed the article. Pretty close to my workflow using fastlane with tauri.

Useful sanity check!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I went to build an open source app from GitHub and was pretty surprised that it requires Xcode and that Xcode can't really be installed without an apple id. I do not want to make one and I certainly will not sign my computer into one.

I did end up somehow installing Xcode via some shady download and was on my way. But the whole ordeal left a very sour taste.

Tangentially, I despise Xcode and love the Expo ecosystem and all the lovely tooling that they have built. It is React Native but Expo honestly makes it so trivial to build stuff from the CLI without ever needing to open that abomination of an app. And with AI, I have built a lot of side project apps onto my iPhone, like a homelab app for monitoring my cameras with push notifications whenever someone is at the door, starting my irrigation and a whole lot more. Plus Tailscale of course. Kind of a crazy world that we live in now.

You still have to open Xcode (to get the certs), and you still have to accept the Xcode EULA. Title is quite misleading if not outright false.

Regardless of the vibe coding aspect, there's good information here for anyone new to the mac/ios build/distribution workflows.

Don't make apps for iOS. The apple ecosystem is horrendous

In my experience, the better long-term choice if you're going to vibe code an app is to use Expo.

Its basis is React, so the code output quality is much higher than Swift because there is much more React code in LLM training data.

Everything is in the command line, and debugging is a breeze because it's a web view. But once it's compiled to native iOS, it feels like any other native app.

Expo + Fastlane = fully automated iOS submission and deployment. I issue one command and see a new version in the App Store.

You can as well make it simpler and use those skills:

https://github.com/software-mansion/argent

or

https://github.com/callstack/agent-device

both callstack and swmansion are mostly react native shops but those should work even in native ios/android as well

In addition to the challenged Xcode, just using Swift seems to require a lot more tokens for both coding and dealing with build/platform quirks. Probably not super significant on indie scale but for anything more robust, it builds up quickly.

React Native and Flutter seem to be much more predictable for the bots (and more fun for humans, since they have actual hot reload).

Interesting this is coming across as novel. This is how CI build machines for Apple’s platforms have been setup in perpetuity.