Is it an automatic answer (I cannot believe anyone who read the post did not notice it was a spam) This is an interesting question, isn't it? I had assumed that these "useless" Apple posts must be bots. Sometimes I downvote them, but the downvotes disappear after a while. Then there was this thread: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/771153 The Apple account posted a useless answer. I downvoted it, but then the downvote disappeared. So I wrote an explicit answer pointing out that the reply was useless, for the benefit of the OP who had asked a genuine question and got nothing in reply except some bot-spam, and downvoted it again. THEN, the amazing thing is that the Apple account posted a reply acknowledging that their post had not answered the question!!! (And didn't remove the downvote, thought it remains "recommended"). So now I don't know what to think. Either, the useless answer was sent by an actual Apple human who didn't read the question, or it was written by a bot that is sentient enough to acknowledge its mistake! IMHO, I fear this practice of bot answer is a very bad evolution for the forum, which value has long been developers speaking to developers, not to bots. I agree. In particular I would appreciate it if bot-posts could be marked as such, and if downvotes (or indeed upvotes!) could go back into the algorithm as training data.

IOS Dark Mode app icons can (and should) have transparent backgrounds. The note you have seen saying “no transparency” is presumably something that has not been updated since dark mode app icons were added.

There must be a more detailed error message in the build log. (It is a misfeature of Xcode that it often hides the details of error messages like this.)

No, there is nothing in the "pathways" documentation that answers his question of "Any good sites you'd recommend for finding programmers".

do you know (I am just curious) why ARM does "and immediate" so restricted ? ADD takes a regular 12-bit immediate. AND also has 12 (or 13?) bits in the instruction for the immediate value, but they are not a regular binary value; they encode a 32- or 64-bit value using a scheme that makes them better at representing the sort of bit patterns you more often need with logical instructions. (At least, that is the intention.) In the earliest ARM instruction sets the format was a a few literal bits and a shift; the current scheme seems more complicated. But 22 (10110) is not one of the patterns that can be represented. Here's a random page with a description: https://dinfuehr.github.io/blog/encoding-of-immediate-values-on-aarch64/ Scroll down to "logical immediates". The same guy has enumerated all the supported values, which is quite interesting and a bit hypnotic to scroll through: https://gist.github.com/dinfuehr/51a01ac58c0b23e4de9aac313ed6a06a

Ugh, I started to reply but it disappeared... I think vand is the wrong syntax. Maybe it's a 32- vs. 64-bit thing? I think that the correct, current, syntax is just AND with the vector width indicated by the register names. See e.g. https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0596/2021-03/SIMD-FP-Instructions/AND--vector---Bitwise-AND--vector--?lang=en

Glad you fixed it! FYI: The old app was sold for a fixed price, and we planned to move to a subscription model, but we didn't want to lock out legacy paid users. The “right way” to do this is to check on startup what version of the app the user originally purchased - you can get this from the app receipt or the StoreKit 2 app transaction - and bypass your subscription code if it is sufficiently old. The difference between this and what you’ve done is whether or not “legacy” users will get further updates.

Surely there is more than that in the build log!

I thought the solution, for ObjC, was to use SKReceiptRefreshRequest to refresh the receipt? That still works but is deprecated. (IIRC).

Is there a point to submit anything through the feedback assistant? Writing a bug report is less damaging, in the longer term, than screaming at your girlfriend, banging your head against the wall, or smashing up your office. Did everyone get the recent survey?

give an error What's the error?

12 months later and once again I'm wondering if I can delete 7.5 GB of "bridgeOS" device support files. Apparently, currently I have: bridgeOS 12.5.5 (16H62) bridgeOS 12.5.6 (16H71) bridgeOS iPhone7,1 12.5.7 (16H81) bridgeOS iPhone11,6 16.3.1 (20D67) Now iPhone7,1 is apparently my iPhone 6 Plus, which I'm no longer using for development, so I guess I can remove that. It is running iOS 12.5.7, so maybe these bridgeOS versions numbers correspond to iOS version numbers? If that's true I can remove all of the 12.x versions. iPhone11,6 is my iPhone XS, which I do still test on - but it's now running iOS 18, so maybe I can get rid of the bridgeOS version 16? Ha, but that one is "zero kb". If anyone knows anything.... wait till I've deleted too much and then let me know what I should have kept, right :-)

Documents or an Application Support directory in the Library. From everything I’ve read, it seems that Apple’s intent is Library/Application Support. Which is the correct location? Application Support - though it doesn’t really matter except in the case where you have a mixture of “documents” that the user needs to have access to via e.g. the Files app and “non-documents” that they shouldn’t. the app stopped displaying what was two years of data in SQLite. I haven’t yet tested for index corruption, however one of the programmers believes this resulted from an iOS update that needed space and cleared data in the cache (but that makes no sense to myself). You weren’t storing it in the Caches directory, or using the “don’t backup” xattr, were you? OS updates can “offload” apps, but I’ve not seen any reports of that causing problems. Do you vacuum your sqlite db?

What is the current state of jailbreaking? If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to crack your devices and continue to run your custom apps. With more than 1000 of them, it is probably worthwhile to employ a “security researcher” to help you with this. If that doesn’t work, sell the devices on eBay and replace them with Android - you may even make a profit doing that, though your software redevelopment costs could wipe that out. It sounds like your business might be large enough to afford a reasonable lawyer, unlike most of those who get terminated without a reason. But of course Apple can afford a better one, so there still isn’t much hope.

How/where do I declare global variables in the same file as "main" location? Variables declared outside of any class, struct or function, i.e. at the zero-indentation level, are ”global”. But what, exactly, do you mean by “main”? The Swift equivalent of the “main function” in the C sense is partly explain by eoonline above, but I don’t think that’s really what you mean. I think you mean something more like “constructor”, or similar. On a large project, there will be multiple associated files that contain related functions. How do make calls to these functions from the "main" file? Do you understand concepts like classes, objects and methods? In C# for example, I can't simply call the function name, it has to be associated the "class" that the function is stored in first. OK, so you have heard of classes… Do I have to declare these related functions in the "main" form ahead of usage? Generally, the Swift compiler finds declarations in other files without any extra work on your part (unlike C). But looking at your example, I think what you may be doing is creating instances of classes in order to call their methods. In that case, the answer is “yes, of course you need to create objects before you can call their (non-static) methods”. Eoonline wrote: Judging from your question, the problem might be less about the Swift language, itself (which I wager that you will quickly grok) than the SwiftUI framework I agree that you should absolutely learn non-UI Swift first, and then learn SwiftUI, taking care to understand that its body declarative parts are subtly different from other Swift code. I used "print(hi)" just to ensure that my function call was being called. Crucially, the calls 1 and 2 are not within a function, they’re within a SwiftUI body declaration. I’m not sure I agree with eoonline that you will “quickly grok” Swift, though. I have the impression that your first language was probably something without classes - maybe Fortran or Pascal - and you continue to think of everything in terms of those semantics.