u/Turbulent_Ad_1039

I went with Mixpanel and wired it in from day one, before there was anything to measure. The reasoning was that adding analytics later means you have no baseline, so you can’t tell whether a change helped or you just got lucky that week. Retrofitting events into a codebase you’ve already shaped is also a lot more painful than putting them in as you build.
What I’m less sure about is whether that was overkill for a solo project. App Store Connect gives you downloads, conversion rate and retention for free, and a lot of people seem to stop there.
So, what’s everyone actually using? Third party tool, Apple’s own numbers, or something you rolled yourself?

Every coding agent I’ve used gives you a spinner and maybe a token count. No idea if you’re 20 seconds out or 5 minutes.
If it said 30s I’d wait. If it said 4 minutes I’d go do something else instead of watching it. That’s where most of my wasted time goes.
I know it’s hard to estimate the model doesn’t know either. But a rough band would beat nothing.

Before, a session ended when I ran out of energy. Now it ends when the usage limit hits, which is a completely different signal and has nothing to do with whether the work is finished.
I’ve caught myself starting a new task at 1am purely because there was quota left. Never once did I open Xcode at 1am because there was “Xcode left”.
Anyone found a way to put a real stop back in the loop, or is everyone just running until the wall?

Dropped into a large codebase I didn’t write, and I need one area of it clear enough to change something without breaking three others. Not the whole architecture — just that corner.
Every chat-with-your-repo tool demos beautifully and then either chokes past a certain size or confidently explains code that was deleted two years ago.
What’s actually held up on a real large codebase? Interested in what failed for you too.

If the folding iPhone ships this fall, apps would need to reflow mid-session into something closer to an iPad ratio — layouts, state preservation, whether the unfolded canvas gets a sidebar at all.
Is anyone budgeting time for that before September? Or waiting to see the hardware and assuming automatic resizability carries you until users complain?

My feed is full of Metal shader demos lately. Not complaining, some of them are gorgeous, but I don’t understand where the wave came from.
Is it that the SwiftUI shader APIs lowered the barrier enough that people who’d never touch Metal are now trying it? Something in the newer Metal releases? Or is it just that shader demos look great in a 10-second video and the algorithm rewards them?
Genuinely curious whether people are shipping this stuff or whether it’s mostly demos.

SwiftData models are reference types with their own change tracking, which makes them awkward to pass around outside the view layer — they carry the context with them and you end up coupled to it everywhere.
What I’ve settled on is wrapping ModelContext in a client with explicit methods and mapping to plain structs at the boundary, so nothing above the data layer knows SwiftData exists. Testing gets easy, cost is the mapping layer.
Curious whether people are doing something less manual, or whether you just let the models flow through and accept the coupling

For iOS developers who work remotely from another device or away from their main Mac, what does your setup look like?
With web/backend development, it seems pretty easy to SSH into a machine, use a remote IDE, or work from almost anywhere. But with iOS development, you still depend heavily on Xcode, builds, and especially interacting with the iOS Simulator.
How do you handle things like:
Building and running the app remotely

Seeing and interacting with the Simulator

Debugging

Testing UI changes quickly

Working when you only have an iPad/iPhone or another laptop with you

Do you just remote desktop into your Mac, or are there better tools/workflows for this?
Curious to hear what setups people actually use.

How do you guys do iOS development remotely?

I can SSH into my Mac pretty easily, but the annoying part is running builds and interacting with the Simulator remotely.

For those who sometimes develop away from their Mac, what setup do you use?

For iOS developers who work remotely from another device or away from their main Mac, what does your setup look like?
With web/backend development, it seems pretty easy to SSH into a machine, use a remote IDE, or work from almost anywhere. But with iOS development, you still depend heavily on Xcode, builds, and especially interacting with the iOS Simulator.
How do you handle things like:
Building and running the app remotely

Seeing and interacting with the Simulator

Debugging

Testing UI changes quickly

Working when you only have an iPad/iPhone or another laptop with you

Do you just remote desktop into your Mac, or are there better tools/workflows for this?
Curious to hear what setups people actually use.