In my Mac's Settings -> General -> Storage -> Developer -> (i) I have a series of entries for "bridgeOS", all 2.49 GB except one that is "zero". Do I need these? Can I remove them? I am only doing "normal" iPhone / iPad development. (There was some previous mention of this here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/711279 with no feedback.)

Dear All, I have a paid app which has in-app purchases to unlock additional content. In my App Store screenshots and preview videos, I used to indicate which content was paid and which was free with labels superimposed over the screen captures. App store review guideline 2.3.2 supports doing this - in fact, it seems to require it: 2.3.2 If your app includes in-app purchases, make sure your app description, screenshots, and previews clearly indicate whether any featured items, levels, subscriptions, etc. require additional purchases. But App Review don't like it. Some years ago they complained about the labels on the screenshots, which I removed. Now they are complaining about the preview videos. They cite guideline 2.3.7, which says (in part, my emphasis): 2.3.7 ... Metadata such as app names, subtitles, screenshots, and previews should not include prices, terms, or descriptions that are not specific to the metadata type. ... So these guidelines seem to be contradictory. If I label a screenshot as "free" or "paid", they consider that to violate 2.3.7. (I'm not showing an actual "$1.23" price, just "free" or "paid".) But I need to indicate whether the content shown is "free" or "paid" in order to comply with 2.3.2. (And I want to label it as such, because I don't want users to misunderstand what is included with their initial purchase.) Has anyone else had this problem? I wonder if there is some particular wording that they require, e.g. "Requires in-app purchase" rather than "Paid". Or something rather than "free". There is a limit to how much text I can legibly add without obscuring the actual content, so I have tried to keep it brief. I did refer to 2.3.2 in my reply to App Review, but they haven't addressed that; they've accepted the update as a bug fix. Ultimately I'll just do what they want - it always seems easiest - but I do have real concern that my customers are worse off without these annotations.

6.7-inch screenshots have become compulsory at some point since I last created an app update, and I will need to purchase a new device to satisfy this requirement. The App Store Connect media manager says that 6.7-inch screenshots must be 1290 x 2796 pixels. Looking at device specs (e.g. at everymac.com), it seems that this is the size of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Plus and iPhone 14 Pro Max. However the iPhone 14 Plus and older are fractionally smaller at 1284 x 2778, despite also being described as "6.7-inch". Does anyone know if App Store Connect will accept 1284 x 2778 screenshots for the "6.7 inch" category? A refurbished iPhone 12 Pro Max is about half the price of an iPhone 15....

NSString* fmt = [NSDateFormatter dateFormatFromTemplate: @"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" options: 0 locale: [NSLocale currentLocale]]; My understanding is that this should rewrite the format string to something that reflects the users current settings. When I run it, it does seem to reflect the "24-Hour Time" setting under General -> Date & Time. But it doesn't reflect the "Date Format" setting under General -> Language & Region. It seems that the date format is always the default for the region set in General -> Language & Region -> Region. It also seems to insert an unexpected comma. Specifically: Region=US, fmt="MM/dd/yyyy, h:mm:ss a" Region=UK, fmt="dd/MM/yyyy, h:mm:ss a" irrespective of the "Date Format" setting. What's going on?

Dear Experts, When I try to use Address Sanitizer on my iOS app, it reports "attempting free on address which was not malloc()-ed" whenever a C++ exception is caught. If first saw it inside Apple's libFontParser and filed FB13271831, but I now see it in my own code. The Address Sanitizer stack trace always starts like this: #1 0x215766ae8 in __cxa_decrement_exception_refcount+0x40 (/usr/lib/libc++abi.dylib:arm64e+0x13ae8) Having looked up __cxa_decrement_exception_refcount in the C++ ABI docs, my guess is that the C++ runtime is creating and destroying the exception objects in some way that Address Sanitizer doesn't properly understand, causing it to think that they are being freed without having been allocated by malloc. This is only really a problem because it does not seem possible to continue after ASan has reported this error; the app is terminated. Question: is there a way to tell Address Sanitiser to ignore errors in this function? And/or, is there a way to continue after the error? Thanks.

I'm confused by the stats on the TestFlight "builds" screen. See below. There are more crashes than sessions. So the definition of "session" can't quite be what I thought. Does a session have to last more than a certain amount of time to be included? Do sessions that end in a crash not count as sessions? Do multiple invocations within a short period of time count as a single session? The number of sessions falls over time. I.e. once I have released a new version, the reported "Sessions" numbers for older versions slowly fall. Maybe as soon as a user has used version N+1, all their sessions for version N are removed from the stats? The "invites" column is clearly the same for every version, while it should have been slowly increasing. Is there any value in these numbers?

In TestFlight crash reports, all I see is the stack trace. Is there any other information hidden in there, such as the specific signal (etc) that caused the app to terminate? Thanks.

I've just downloaded Xcode 15 (3.18 GB), and when I start it it downloads "additional components". It's currently downloading "iOS 17.0 Simulator" (7.56 GB). I don't need the simulator, but I do need to compile for iOS and run on devices. Do I need this "simulator" download? I note that while the small download progress window says "iOS 17.0 Simulator (21A328)", the main Xcode window won't let me compile/run the project because it is "Downloading iOS 17.0..." - though I'm not sure if the "..." at the end of that is a truncation eliding the word "Simulator".

Dear experts, I get glyphs from the system font using CTFontGetGlyphsForCharacters, something like this: UIFont* uifont = [UIFont monospacedDigitSystemFontOfSize: s weight: w]; CTFontRef font = (__bridge CTFontRef)uifont; CTFontGetGlyphsForCharacters(font, ....); The characters that I ask for are basically latin-1 plus a few others. The app is not localised for Chinese. When I change the phone's default language to Chinese, this code gets glyphs for most characters OK but it fails for a few punctuation symbols: 91 = [ 93 = ] 183 = middle dot 8220 = left double curly quote 8221 = right double curly quote Can anyone guess what's going on here? What's special about those characters? Thanks, Phil.

Has anyone paid a graphics designer to produce custom SF Symbols for them? Would you care to share your experiences? I paid for some custom graphics a decade ago; the results were OK but not amazing. I forget how I found that guy. No doubt everything has changed since then.

Dear All, I've just received an email from a user of my paid app who says he is no longer able to use it on his work phone. He works for a US government agency which I'll abbreviate to GOV below. Apparently they have started using Microsoft Intune for device management and as a result they need the following work-around: This app is not free to download, so it cannot be added to Intune app catalog through this tool. Reach out to the app developer and explain that GOV uses Apple Business Manager (ABM) and MDM for delivering managed apps to devices. Payment through ABM is not supported by GOV, so the app developer will need to provide a version of the app that's free to download but take payment outside of the Apple ID payment process. GOV's Custom App Store can be access by developers by advertising their app to Organization ID 12345678. I don't know much about MDM, ABM and Intune, and I would more or less consider this a scam except that I am confident that the person who has sent it really does work for this government agency and does use my app on his personal device. Is there any possibility that what they are asking for is legitimate? I suspect that the crucial part is: "Payment through ABM is not supported by GOV", i.e. fundamentally ABM/MDM/Intune can support paid apps, but the financial people at GOV AGENCY have chosen not to support that. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

I've just been looking at this list of APIs for which we will be soon be required to declare a "required reason" in the app's privacy manifest: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/privacy_manifest_files/describing_use_of_required_reason_api One of the listed functions is stat(). The rationale seems to be that a malicious app can use stat to get the timestamps of files outside the app container, thereby "fingerprinting" the device. The allowed reasons that we can declare are : To get timestamps that are displayed to the user. To get timestamps of files that are within the app's container. To get timestamps of files that the user has granted access to. I am concerned that this does not include many of the legitimate non-timestamp uses of stat(). For example, it can be used simply to test if a file exists, or to test whether a path refers to a file or a directory, or to check if two paths refer to the same file (e.g. via different symlinks), or to get the size of a file. Some of these things can be achieved in other ways; for example, I can check if a file exists by trying to open() it and checking for an error, and I can get the file size by opening it and calling lseek(SEEK_END). Maybe I can check if two paths are equivalent by using readlink() to form canonical paths for both and comparing them. But I bet there are other things that can't be done. I could probably fix all of my code to not call stat() for non-timestamp reasons in a few hours. It would be more difficult to fix the various open-source libraries that I use. What do you think we should all be doing?: "File a bug" asking for an additional reason for using stat(), i.e. to get non-timestamp information about files in the app's container. Deliberately mis-read allowed reason C617.1, "to access the timestamps of files inside the app container", as " to access the timestamps and other metadata of files inside the app container", and declare that in the privacy manifest. Change code to not call stat(). Any other suggestions? P.S. I guess that libc++ std::filesystem calls stat(). What is the status of using that? The std::filesystem functions that access file timestamps are not listed on the page linked above. If I call std::exists() to check if a file exists, and assuming that is implemented using stat(), will that trigger the new filter?

Dear Experts, NSLocale has a notification NSCurrentLocaleDidChangeNotification and a property autoupdatingCurrentLocale ("A locale which tracks the user’s current preferences"). These suggest that an app should be able to detect when the user changes their language preference while running, or when it is resumed from the background. In practice, when I change language in the Settings app (either globally or just for my app), the app is terminated by iOS and restarts with new locale. Is this the expected behaviour? I am wondering if there is something I need to do to advertise that the app can adopt language changes without restarting, or something. Maybe only date-time formats, etc., trigger the notification but language changes don't?

Is it possible to change the date formats used in the App Store Connect web interface? It seems to me that things like the date range selection widget on the Sales & Trends page use only the US-style MM/DD/YYYY format. Is there some way to change this to YYYY-MM-DD or DD/MM/YYYY that I have missed?

I see this warning when my app runs: Thread running at QOS_CLASS_USER_INTERACTIVE waiting on a lower QoS thread running at QOS_CLASS_DEFAULT. Investigate ways to avoid priority inversions This is true; I know what is going on. I'd like this other thread to have a higher priority. But how do I set the "QOS class" for a thread? Searching developer.apple.com for QOS_CLASS_USER_INTERACTIVE doesn't find much. It seems that dispatch queues have priorities, but in this case I have a thread, not a dispatch queue. Any ideas?