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Is there any future for screensavers on macOS?
I haven't been looking at screensavers for a long time because of Apple's lack of will (or resources?) to provide a public version of the private modern SDK used by Apple for a very long time now. I'm now looking at the Screen Saver pane in System Settings (the What-If version of System Preferences in an alternate universe where all screens are in portrait mode). In macOS Sequoia, it seems like 3rd party screensavers are not welcome considering that they are relegated to the "Other" section at the bottom of the list and you have to click Show All to start seeing 3rd party screen savers. I also had a quick look at macOS Tahoe Beta 3 and it looks like that all the real screensavers are gone (3rd party and the ones from Apple: Hello, Message, Flurry, etc.) or at least it requires to be a Nobel Prize to find them (and the Search field is not useful). I tried to install a 3rd party screen saver on macOS Tahoe Beta 3, it doesn't show up in the list. To summarize: No public access to modern APIs AFAIK. UI that is hostile to 3rd party screen savers on macOS Sequoia. Apparently only screensavers that are slideshows or movies curated by Apple in macOS Tahoe b3. Hence the question: Is there any future for screen savers on macOS? Because if there's none, I won't waste my time trying to update some old screen savers.
3
0
593
Aug ’25
Request: API to temporarily defer Reachability for fullscreen game swipes (bottom edge)
In swipe-driven games, a first downward swipe starting near the home indicator can trigger Reachability, even when using preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures = .bottom and prefersHomeIndicatorAutoHidden = true. This causes the app to slide down to half screen and breaks gameplay. Please consider an API to temporarily defer Reachability while a custom gesture is active (similar to existing system gesture deferral), without disabling accessibility globally. Environment: Devices: iPhones with Home Indicator (Face ID) Why this matters: Bottom-origin swipes are core in many games (flick shots, slingshot, physics toss, bottom sheets). Current workarounds degrade UX and discoverability, and players still accidentally trigger Reachability. Feedback Assistant Post
2
0
682
Aug ’25
Unity PolySpatia
Hello, We are experiencing an issue with apparent lag or latency when interacting with objects in Unity using the XR Interaction Toolkit. Even when interactables are configured with the Movement Type set to Instantaneous, objects exhibit a noticeable delay when following hand movement. This issue is particularly apparent when the hand moves at higher speeds. We would like to know: is any additional configuration required, or is there something else we need to do to resolve this? Thank you very much for your assistance.
2
0
603
Aug ’25
iPhone Pro Model - RefreshRate
I want to display the refresh rate on the screen of the iPhone (14 Pro Max), but each app of the App Store's "Floating Clock", "Floating Clock Premium" and "Screen Renewal Rate - RefreshRate Realtime" can only display two of 60Hz and 120Hz, and I wonder if it can display numbers of 1Hz, 10Hz, tens of Hz, or more than 3 levels. Does anyone know how to do it?
1
0
334
Sep ’25
Testing Gamecenter Accounts
HI all, I'm in the early stages of testing a game that will have real-time device-to-device communication using GameCenter. I've read something about setting up GameCenter "sandbox" accounts to test prior to the game's release, but I can't find anything reliable about how to do so. I've found lots of web pages which purport to describe how to do this task, but what they describe seems to be outdated, as the steps don't appear to be available in modern versions of iOS. I'm testing on iOS 18 and 26. Document search isn't helping--I mostly find information on how to set up StoreKit sandbox accounts, which I assume are different things altogether--so if you could point me towards an article that allows me to test a new, unreleased GameKit app between devices, I'd appreciate it. People are developing GameCenter apps, so I know it's possible... advTHANKSance
1
0
420
Sep ’25
Inquiry About Game Center Integration Analytics
Dear Apple Developer Support, I hope this message finds you well. I am a game developer looking to integrate Game Center into our game. Before proceeding, I would like to understand the analytical capabilities available post-integration. Specifically, I am interested in tracking detailed metrics such as: The number of new player downloads driven by Game Center features (e.g., friend challenges, leaderboards, or achievements). Data on user engagement and conversions originating from Game Center interactions. I have explored App Store Connect’s App Analytics but would appreciate clarification on whether Game Center-specific data (e.g., referrals from challenges or social features) is available to measure growth and optimize our strategies. If such data is accessible, could you guide me on how to view it? If not, are there alternative methods or plans to incorporate this in the future? Thank you for your time and assistance. I look forward to your response. Best regards, Bella
1
0
1k
Sep ’25
HidHide on MacOS
I was wondering if there's a method on MacOS to have my application hide a hid device such as a game controller and instead have the receiving game/application see my app's virtual controller? Is this possible via DriverKit or some other form of kernel level coding? On Windows we have a tool known as HidHide that hids a game controller from all other applications. Is it possible to implement such behavior into an app or is that system level?
2
0
1.2k
1w
Core Text incremental redraw glitch: overlapping glyphs during editing
During editing in Pages (or Word) I am getting these glitches (see attachment). Started after the last update to Mac OS 26.3 (beta) Also removed 2 recent instalments (Blackhole audio driver and kDrive/Infomaniak, but trouble is still there. 27" iMac 2020 (Intel) i7 3,8 Ghz AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT 8 GB 24 GB RAM macOS Tahoe 26.3 (=beta) Tried restart in safe mode, checked fonts. Talked to aissistent to get a solution, but no ...) Thx for any advice, Pieter (not a developer so please kee pit simple 🙏🏻)
3
0
774
Feb ’26
How can I uninstall game-porting-toolkit completely
So, I'm done with GPTK and decided to delete it. The only thing I installed was brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit and the external libraries from the ditto command. Now, I tried to remove it, but even after brew remove game-porting-toolkit brew autoremove all of the dependencies installed with brew are still there. The most obvious was game-porting-toolkit-compiler, but even after removing this there are so many libraries that are now orphaned and it's just impossible to manually identify those. Is there a way or is the easiest way to simply uninstall Homebrew completely and reinstall it again?
0
0
315
May ’25
MacOS Catalina 10.15.7 CoreGraphic.framework not find symbol
I recently needed to develop an application to obtain the window list, which requires Screen Recording permissions. Apple's official documentation mentions using the two functions CGPreflightScreenCaptureAccess and CGRequestScreenCaptureAccess to request permissions. These functions are stated to be available since version 10.15. However, when I used these two functions on a device running macOS 10.15.7, I encountered the errors shown in the attached screenshot. I used the nm tool to inspect the symbols in the CoreGraphics.framework and found that these two functions were not present. Could you help me understand why this is happening?
0
0
112
May ’25
Metal HUD Logging issue
Hi I've noticed one issue in Metal HUD, but I'm not sure if it is a bug in the Metal HUD or if there is a purpose for this behavior. Metal HUD has an option to send the data to system log in raw format where the numbers are like metal-HUD: ,,,,,..., https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/monitoring-your-metal-apps-graphics-performance/ If the HUD is displayed, it works just fine, but it seems that when the HUD is hidden (with shift-F9), it still send the data to system log, but the numbers are the same all the time and are not updated while is still being updated. I would expect that it should log the data no matter if the HUD is displayed or not, this of course leads to incorrect FPS calculations Here is an example of the system log entries when the HUD is not visible:
0
0
128
May ’25
Animations for streaming
We have a macOS app (not yet released, but in use by ourselves), that provides scoreboards for streaming sport events. Today it is expected, that there are nice animations for goals, etc. We are streaming using NDI, which requires a CVPixelBuffer for each frame. We currently create these animations using CABasicAnimation, CAAnimation and CAKeyframeAnimation. In addition we use ScreenCaptureKit to generate the frames. This works fine with 25/30 fps, as long as the window where our animations are performed in is visible. But this is not what it should be. We have a smaller window as main app window and control display performing the animations in reduced size, while the streaming animations need to be in HD format and later maybe in 4K. When using an offscreen window, the animations are not calculated. We get 1 frame per second or so. So we actually have to connect an external display to the MacBook and open the large windows there. Ugly solution. Do we use a completely wrong approach? Or is there a way to tell the macOS to perform the animations although it is an offscreen window? If it cannot work that way, what is an alternative?
0
0
159
May ’25
screencapturekit
I have code that captures a window and displays a cropped image. The problem is 2 fold. Kit doesn't seem to allow to modify stop and recapture image in window mode to capture a portion of the screen. So this makes me having to crop and display the cropped image via a published variable. This all works find. But seems to stop after some time. Using an M1 16gig ram. program is taking less than 100meg of mem with 40-70%cpu as the crow flies. printing captured success in debug mode and sometimes frame isn't valid so guarding against it. any ideas on how to improve my strategy?
0
0
164
Jun ’25
Can Game Mode be activated when a child (Java) process's window is fullscreened?
Imagine a native macOS app that acts as a "launcher" for a Java game.** For example, the "launcher" app might use the Swift Process API or a similar method to run the java command line tool (lets assume the user has installed Java themselves) to run the game. I have seen How to Enable Game Mode. If the native launcher app's Info.plist has the following keys set: LSApplicationCategoryType set to public.app-category.games LSSupportsGameMode set to true (for macOS 26+) GCSupportsGameMode set to true The launcher itself can cause Game Mode to activate if the launcher is fullscreened. However, if the launcher opens a Java process that opens a window, then the Java window is fullscreened, Game Mode doesn't seem to activate. In this case activating Game Mode for the launcher itself is unnecessary, but you'd expect Game Mode to activate when the actual game in the Java window is fullscreened. Is there a way to get Game Mode to activate in the latter case? ** The concrete case I'm thinking of is a third-party Minecraft Java Edition launcher, but the issue can also be demonstrated in a sample project (FB13786152). It seems like the official Minecraft launcher is able to do this, though it's not clear how. (Is its bundle identifier hardcoded in the OS to allow for this? Changing a sample app's bundle identifier to be the same as the official Minecraft launcher gets the behavior I want, but obviously this is not a practical solution.)
2
0
502
Jun ’25
Game Porting Toolkit: Any .exe exits immediately with no output
Hi Apple & devs, I'm trying to test various Windows .exe files using the Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK), but I’m hitting a wall: no matter what .exe I try, the command returns instantly with no output — no error, no logs, nothing. Here's what I'm doing: I'm using macOS Sequioa 15.5 on M1 macbook pro. I installed gameportingtoolkt GPTK 2.1 through brew from gcenx: brew install gcenx/wine/game-porting-toolkit When I run any .exe using GPTK's wine64, like this, e.g. with steam user@JMacBook-Pro / % WINEPREFIX=~/wine_prefix /usr/local/bin/gameportingtoolkit 'C:\SteamSetup.exe' --verbose user@JMacBook-Pro / % Immediate exit without any return code, output, nor errors. No output, no crash, no logs. Same result with simple test apps Running with WINEDEBUG=+all (still no output) Even running wine64 does the same thing. I’ve tried: Removing and reinstalling GPTK Creating a fresh WINEPREFIX Checking /tmp and ~/Library/Logs for logs — nothing Has anyone else experienced this or have any idea how to debug it? Is there ANY Apple support for this?? Thanks in advance.
1
0
288
Jun ’25
Is there any future for screensavers on macOS?
I haven't been looking at screensavers for a long time because of Apple's lack of will (or resources?) to provide a public version of the private modern SDK used by Apple for a very long time now. I'm now looking at the Screen Saver pane in System Settings (the What-If version of System Preferences in an alternate universe where all screens are in portrait mode). In macOS Sequoia, it seems like 3rd party screensavers are not welcome considering that they are relegated to the "Other" section at the bottom of the list and you have to click Show All to start seeing 3rd party screen savers. I also had a quick look at macOS Tahoe Beta 3 and it looks like that all the real screensavers are gone (3rd party and the ones from Apple: Hello, Message, Flurry, etc.) or at least it requires to be a Nobel Prize to find them (and the Search field is not useful). I tried to install a 3rd party screen saver on macOS Tahoe Beta 3, it doesn't show up in the list. To summarize: No public access to modern APIs AFAIK. UI that is hostile to 3rd party screen savers on macOS Sequoia. Apparently only screensavers that are slideshows or movies curated by Apple in macOS Tahoe b3. Hence the question: Is there any future for screen savers on macOS? Because if there's none, I won't waste my time trying to update some old screen savers.
Replies
3
Boosts
0
Views
593
Activity
Aug ’25
Request: API to temporarily defer Reachability for fullscreen game swipes (bottom edge)
In swipe-driven games, a first downward swipe starting near the home indicator can trigger Reachability, even when using preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures = .bottom and prefersHomeIndicatorAutoHidden = true. This causes the app to slide down to half screen and breaks gameplay. Please consider an API to temporarily defer Reachability while a custom gesture is active (similar to existing system gesture deferral), without disabling accessibility globally. Environment: Devices: iPhones with Home Indicator (Face ID) Why this matters: Bottom-origin swipes are core in many games (flick shots, slingshot, physics toss, bottom sheets). Current workarounds degrade UX and discoverability, and players still accidentally trigger Reachability. Feedback Assistant Post
Replies
2
Boosts
0
Views
682
Activity
Aug ’25
Unity PolySpatia
Hello, We are experiencing an issue with apparent lag or latency when interacting with objects in Unity using the XR Interaction Toolkit. Even when interactables are configured with the Movement Type set to Instantaneous, objects exhibit a noticeable delay when following hand movement. This issue is particularly apparent when the hand moves at higher speeds. We would like to know: is any additional configuration required, or is there something else we need to do to resolve this? Thank you very much for your assistance.
Replies
2
Boosts
0
Views
603
Activity
Aug ’25
iPhone Pro Model - RefreshRate
I want to display the refresh rate on the screen of the iPhone (14 Pro Max), but each app of the App Store's "Floating Clock", "Floating Clock Premium" and "Screen Renewal Rate - RefreshRate Realtime" can only display two of 60Hz and 120Hz, and I wonder if it can display numbers of 1Hz, 10Hz, tens of Hz, or more than 3 levels. Does anyone know how to do it?
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
334
Activity
Sep ’25
Testing Gamecenter Accounts
HI all, I'm in the early stages of testing a game that will have real-time device-to-device communication using GameCenter. I've read something about setting up GameCenter "sandbox" accounts to test prior to the game's release, but I can't find anything reliable about how to do so. I've found lots of web pages which purport to describe how to do this task, but what they describe seems to be outdated, as the steps don't appear to be available in modern versions of iOS. I'm testing on iOS 18 and 26. Document search isn't helping--I mostly find information on how to set up StoreKit sandbox accounts, which I assume are different things altogether--so if you could point me towards an article that allows me to test a new, unreleased GameKit app between devices, I'd appreciate it. People are developing GameCenter apps, so I know it's possible... advTHANKSance
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
420
Activity
Sep ’25
Inquiry About Game Center Integration Analytics
Dear Apple Developer Support, I hope this message finds you well. I am a game developer looking to integrate Game Center into our game. Before proceeding, I would like to understand the analytical capabilities available post-integration. Specifically, I am interested in tracking detailed metrics such as: The number of new player downloads driven by Game Center features (e.g., friend challenges, leaderboards, or achievements). Data on user engagement and conversions originating from Game Center interactions. I have explored App Store Connect’s App Analytics but would appreciate clarification on whether Game Center-specific data (e.g., referrals from challenges or social features) is available to measure growth and optimize our strategies. If such data is accessible, could you guide me on how to view it? If not, are there alternative methods or plans to incorporate this in the future? Thank you for your time and assistance. I look forward to your response. Best regards, Bella
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
1k
Activity
Sep ’25
The problem of suspending the device in game mode
https://developer.apple.com/forums/profile/mozheralqahtani
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
370
Activity
Nov ’25
findNavigator
How can I paste a string to the findNavigator of a TextEditor ?
Replies
2
Boosts
0
Views
803
Activity
Dec ’25
HidHide on MacOS
I was wondering if there's a method on MacOS to have my application hide a hid device such as a game controller and instead have the receiving game/application see my app's virtual controller? Is this possible via DriverKit or some other form of kernel level coding? On Windows we have a tool known as HidHide that hids a game controller from all other applications. Is it possible to implement such behavior into an app or is that system level?
Replies
2
Boosts
0
Views
1.2k
Activity
1w
Virtual Controllers on Mac via the Game Controller Framework
Hi fellow devs, I have a quick question is it possible to have virtual controllers on Mac. For instance can my app exclusively manage the controller and output it into the Game Controller framework? And create a virtual controller to allow for features such as controller emulation, haptic control, and others.
Replies
7
Boosts
0
Views
842
Activity
Jan ’26
Core Text incremental redraw glitch: overlapping glyphs during editing
During editing in Pages (or Word) I am getting these glitches (see attachment). Started after the last update to Mac OS 26.3 (beta) Also removed 2 recent instalments (Blackhole audio driver and kDrive/Infomaniak, but trouble is still there. 27" iMac 2020 (Intel) i7 3,8 Ghz AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT 8 GB 24 GB RAM macOS Tahoe 26.3 (=beta) Tried restart in safe mode, checked fonts. Talked to aissistent to get a solution, but no ...) Thx for any advice, Pieter (not a developer so please kee pit simple 🙏🏻)
Replies
3
Boosts
0
Views
774
Activity
Feb ’26
Noob ios 26 for game mobile legend só lag 🤮🤮
Why you don’t fix that ?
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
350
Activity
3w
Airplay content from Apple device to Vision Pro
Does anyone know if we will be able to airplay content from another Apple device, say an iPad or iPhone to the Vision Pro?
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
1.3k
Activity
Nov ’25
How can I uninstall game-porting-toolkit completely
So, I'm done with GPTK and decided to delete it. The only thing I installed was brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit and the external libraries from the ditto command. Now, I tried to remove it, but even after brew remove game-porting-toolkit brew autoremove all of the dependencies installed with brew are still there. The most obvious was game-porting-toolkit-compiler, but even after removing this there are so many libraries that are now orphaned and it's just impossible to manually identify those. Is there a way or is the easiest way to simply uninstall Homebrew completely and reinstall it again?
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
315
Activity
May ’25
MacOS Catalina 10.15.7 CoreGraphic.framework not find symbol
I recently needed to develop an application to obtain the window list, which requires Screen Recording permissions. Apple's official documentation mentions using the two functions CGPreflightScreenCaptureAccess and CGRequestScreenCaptureAccess to request permissions. These functions are stated to be available since version 10.15. However, when I used these two functions on a device running macOS 10.15.7, I encountered the errors shown in the attached screenshot. I used the nm tool to inspect the symbols in the CoreGraphics.framework and found that these two functions were not present. Could you help me understand why this is happening?
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
112
Activity
May ’25
Metal HUD Logging issue
Hi I've noticed one issue in Metal HUD, but I'm not sure if it is a bug in the Metal HUD or if there is a purpose for this behavior. Metal HUD has an option to send the data to system log in raw format where the numbers are like metal-HUD: ,,,,,..., https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/monitoring-your-metal-apps-graphics-performance/ If the HUD is displayed, it works just fine, but it seems that when the HUD is hidden (with shift-F9), it still send the data to system log, but the numbers are the same all the time and are not updated while is still being updated. I would expect that it should log the data no matter if the HUD is displayed or not, this of course leads to incorrect FPS calculations Here is an example of the system log entries when the HUD is not visible:
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
128
Activity
May ’25
Animations for streaming
We have a macOS app (not yet released, but in use by ourselves), that provides scoreboards for streaming sport events. Today it is expected, that there are nice animations for goals, etc. We are streaming using NDI, which requires a CVPixelBuffer for each frame. We currently create these animations using CABasicAnimation, CAAnimation and CAKeyframeAnimation. In addition we use ScreenCaptureKit to generate the frames. This works fine with 25/30 fps, as long as the window where our animations are performed in is visible. But this is not what it should be. We have a smaller window as main app window and control display performing the animations in reduced size, while the streaming animations need to be in HD format and later maybe in 4K. When using an offscreen window, the animations are not calculated. We get 1 frame per second or so. So we actually have to connect an external display to the MacBook and open the large windows there. Ugly solution. Do we use a completely wrong approach? Or is there a way to tell the macOS to perform the animations although it is an offscreen window? If it cannot work that way, what is an alternative?
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
159
Activity
May ’25
screencapturekit
I have code that captures a window and displays a cropped image. The problem is 2 fold. Kit doesn't seem to allow to modify stop and recapture image in window mode to capture a portion of the screen. So this makes me having to crop and display the cropped image via a published variable. This all works find. But seems to stop after some time. Using an M1 16gig ram. program is taking less than 100meg of mem with 40-70%cpu as the crow flies. printing captured success in debug mode and sometimes frame isn't valid so guarding against it. any ideas on how to improve my strategy?
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
164
Activity
Jun ’25
Can Game Mode be activated when a child (Java) process's window is fullscreened?
Imagine a native macOS app that acts as a "launcher" for a Java game.** For example, the "launcher" app might use the Swift Process API or a similar method to run the java command line tool (lets assume the user has installed Java themselves) to run the game. I have seen How to Enable Game Mode. If the native launcher app's Info.plist has the following keys set: LSApplicationCategoryType set to public.app-category.games LSSupportsGameMode set to true (for macOS 26+) GCSupportsGameMode set to true The launcher itself can cause Game Mode to activate if the launcher is fullscreened. However, if the launcher opens a Java process that opens a window, then the Java window is fullscreened, Game Mode doesn't seem to activate. In this case activating Game Mode for the launcher itself is unnecessary, but you'd expect Game Mode to activate when the actual game in the Java window is fullscreened. Is there a way to get Game Mode to activate in the latter case? ** The concrete case I'm thinking of is a third-party Minecraft Java Edition launcher, but the issue can also be demonstrated in a sample project (FB13786152). It seems like the official Minecraft launcher is able to do this, though it's not clear how. (Is its bundle identifier hardcoded in the OS to allow for this? Changing a sample app's bundle identifier to be the same as the official Minecraft launcher gets the behavior I want, but obviously this is not a practical solution.)
Replies
2
Boosts
0
Views
502
Activity
Jun ’25
Game Porting Toolkit: Any .exe exits immediately with no output
Hi Apple & devs, I'm trying to test various Windows .exe files using the Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK), but I’m hitting a wall: no matter what .exe I try, the command returns instantly with no output — no error, no logs, nothing. Here's what I'm doing: I'm using macOS Sequioa 15.5 on M1 macbook pro. I installed gameportingtoolkt GPTK 2.1 through brew from gcenx: brew install gcenx/wine/game-porting-toolkit When I run any .exe using GPTK's wine64, like this, e.g. with steam user@JMacBook-Pro / % WINEPREFIX=~/wine_prefix /usr/local/bin/gameportingtoolkit 'C:\SteamSetup.exe' --verbose user@JMacBook-Pro / % Immediate exit without any return code, output, nor errors. No output, no crash, no logs. Same result with simple test apps Running with WINEDEBUG=+all (still no output) Even running wine64 does the same thing. I’ve tried: Removing and reinstalling GPTK Creating a fresh WINEPREFIX Checking /tmp and ~/Library/Logs for logs — nothing Has anyone else experienced this or have any idea how to debug it? Is there ANY Apple support for this?? Thanks in advance.
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
288
Activity
Jun ’25