When will Apple get its act together regarding iPhone development?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Anyone who has developed for both Apple and Android is aware that the process tends to be easier on Android. But why is this? Apple has a vast pool of money, so they could invest some of it to make iPhone/iPad development easier. And this is a well known path for achieving software dominance. One of the things that allowed Microsoft to win, back in the 1990s, was their focus on building tools that made it easy for developers to write software for Windows (and few things will ever match VisualBasic 6, for making it easy for beginners to learn how to code).

I just ran into another annoyance with Apple:

Xcode: Could not locate device support files

As i am trying to run my application from newly updated Xcode 8 to my iPhone 4 which is running iOS 7.1.2

Someone replied:

I had a similar problem because the app store version was missing iOS 10.1 support in Xcode 8 and they haven’t rolled an update yet. This caused the “Xcode: Could not locate device support files” problem. You can download the latest update https://developer.apple.com/download/ and it is more current and supports iOS 10.1 (14B72c).

Someone else commented on the reply:

Upvoted. Does anybody else find this ridiculous? I get pestered to install this update to my iPhone, and when I finally relent I’m prevented from running my iOS app on it. Then I upgrade macOS thinking that must be the problem. Nope. Thirty minutes later and now I’m downloading a 4.1GB Xcode beta version to allow me to keep building to the iPhone I was nagged to upgrade. Not pleased. – aardvarkk Oct 26 ’16 at 15:07

And someone else replied to the comment:

Yes, I find it ridiculous too, it’s not just you! The worst thing is that the link provided by Manny above shows that Xcode 8.1 is available but when you click the download link it ‘helpfully’ opens the App Store on the Xcode page showing version 8.0 – with no option to download 8.1. So here I am unable to run up the app on a device because Apple can’t get their act in gear. Wouldn’t happen on Android ;-) – DilbertDave Oct 27 ’16 at 18:59

Post external references

  1. 1
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39655178/xcode-could-not-locate-device-support-files
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