Xcode 27.1 Beta Release Notes

Finally! So we have a little over a month between getting the simulator and first customers running our apps in Duo.

I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually.

I've been testing with Xcode 27.1 on the Duo simulator and I was pleasantly surprised that nearly everything worked well, untouched. The main thing I need a real device for is knowing which buttons are easier or harder to press on the right edge, but using modern UIKit this was not that difficult. That, and taking advantage of the left/right inner display content areas.

Apple also bundles a /uikit-app-modernization skill which should help with adopting layouts to iPhone Duo.

I think this is my main hesitation with picking up the Duo on the first release. I have no doubt the build quality is exceptional, but the chance that the apps I use are not well optimized for this new form factor is pretty high in the first year of its release.

I don't think they won't work, but I anticipate oddities to appear for a while, especially for older applications.

Now available for testing apps on the iPhone Duo!

Here are some screenshots from getting my own app compiled, if anyone is interested:

https://bsky.app/profile/cameronbanga.com/post/3mvsrxk5q7b2j

https://bsky.app/profile/cameronbanga.com/post/3mvss5wmxej2l

I presume this Xcode 27.1 beta will not want to launch on our Mavericks Forever, the last Mac OS we actually like and use.

Looks like Safari 27.1 on Duo ships without support for CSS viewport segments and any other CSS or JS to handle foldables.

I started adding support for iPhone Duo in some of my apps. Here's an example of some of the work required https://mastodon.social/@simsaens/117296064810231465 — all my apps are hobby apps. Even though they all support iPad / resizability, it's still a large amount of work

Thanks for Axiom, looks useful. Does it already cover the new 27.1 beta APIs?

I'm just gonna ignore this thing and continue as if it never existed. Worked with Vision Pro that no body uses and will work with this.

It really feels quite irrelevant. Also, the amount of work to support this with zero support from Apple since WWDC is just absurd. And even if one does the work, Apple will just sherlock the cool features into their apps.

Waiting for my coding agent to have zero idea what I mean when I say build for iPhone duo (due to knowledge cutoffs in pre-training; happened when Liquid Glass came out previously).