Thank you for the lengthy answer but I am not quite following. I asked: I can't see that device at all. Is that know limitation (devicectl only work in iOS 17 and above) or is something wrong with my setup. And if I understand correctly the answer was I believe the devicectl is primarily designed to function with iOS 17 and later. So what does that mean? What does "primarily design" mean in practice? When I run xcrun devicectl list devices should I see my iOS 16.7.10 in that list or not? If you have actual documentation that would be really helpful. I am currently using XCode 16.2. I understand that you want everyone to use XCode, but my use case is this: I am developing a Safari Web Extension and I want the host app to rebuild, deploy and open Mobile Safari automatically when I change my Web Extension typescript code. This is possible to do with xcodebuild and devicectl but AFAIK not with XCode. So my problem is that I can't see my test device in devicectl. I am trying to understand does buying a new test device help or is there something wrong with my configs.

Anyone coming to this later. Yes it seems devicectl is not supported in iOS 16. I bought a new test device where I can install newest iOS version and devicectl worked there immediately. And please Apple. Do something about your documentation. It is terrible. Do this google search "apple developer documentation opinions" and please see what the dev community things about your docs. A company of your caliber must be able to do something about it.

To learn about this command, run the following command in Terminal: Come on!! Not all iOS devs are just copy pasting commands from Chat GPT and Stack Overflow. Some actually know what they are doing :D The problem is that these devs cannot know the limitations of dev tools unless they are documented. Or the tool provides clear error messages. Otherwise they are doomed to waste hours debugging things that won't work in the first place.

Okay makes sense. Thanks for the explanation. I tweaked a bit some of my build steps and got it working. Basically I am trying to build an SDK that contains a packet tunnel provider and the signature and bundle identifier requirements for extension are giving me headaches. Since for SDK I cannot really know the host app bundle identifier or signing information at my build time. Anyway thanks a lot. This will most likely help me forward