Summary of Notable iOS App Development Changes (2026/07/22)
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When developing iOS apps, it's important to keep an eye not only on Apple's beta releases but also on specification changes in the SDKs and tools you use, from a maintenance perspective. This time, several changes with potentially wide impact have come together over the past few days, so I've decided to summarize the topics that caught my attention.
Apple
iOS & iPadOS 27 Beta 4 Release Notes Published
Almost all of the Known Issues from Beta 3 have been moved to Resolved Issues. Beta 4 feels considerably more stable. The newly added known issues are as follows:
- In TestFlight, the refund request, offer code redemption, and subscription management sheets are not displayed
- In Siri's navigation voice readout, the ends of words are cut off (the workaround is to lower the inflection/speed or turn off Expressive Voices)
Xcode 27 Beta 4 Release Notes Published
Beta 4 gives the impression of focusing more on bug fixes related to developer experience such as Previews, rather than new features.
- Fixed a hang in Previews when applying a large number of edits at once with AI-assisted editing
- Fixed canvas size reset in Resizable Canvas mode
- Fixed an issue where previews would not work when selecting a Mac Catalyst run destination
- LLDB can now inspect fields of
~Copyabletypes such as those in the standard library
Changes to Consider for App Maintenance
From the iOS 27 Beta 4 / Xcode 27 Beta 4 release notes, the following are likely to affect existing app code and implementations:
- canOpenURL(_:) has been deprecated. Migration to an implementation that handles failure after attempting to open a URL without pre-validating it is recommended
- I believe this is because some apps/businesses were using this to detect whether certain apps were installed and leveraging it for marketing purposes, and this change is a countermeasure against that
- A cumulative 10MB size limit has been imposed on
AppEntityinstances, and a known issue has been added stating that exceeding this limit may cause the app to crash - As a known Swift Compiler issue, depending on the declaration order of init accessors and getters, source incompatibilities derived from SE-0508 may occur. This can be avoided by declaring init accessors before getters
- Init accessors are a feature introduced in Swift 5.9 that allows you to write custom assignment logic when initializing a property. Declaring a getter before them in the same type will be affected by this incompatibility
"Design Principles" Page Republished on HIG
The "Design Principles" page, which summarizes the fundamental principles that serve as design guidelines across Apple platforms, has been republished within the Human Interface Guidelines page.
Claude Code
iOS Simulator Panel Added to Claude Code Desktop (macOS) in Public Beta
An "iOS Simulator panel" that displays the iOS Simulator screen live while Claude builds, installs, and launches the app for review has been added as a public beta. A notable feature is that not only can you watch Claude's actions, but you can also tap and swipe to interact on the panel yourself. However, since screenshots taken are sent to and stored by Anthropic, it seems best not to use a device signed in with a real account.
At this point it is not available on the Enterprise plan, so for business use, you will need to wait a while until support is added.
Firebase
Firebase Remote Config Pricing Changes
Firebase Remote Config, which has been provided free of charge until now, has been announced to switch to a new pricing structure starting September 1, 2026. The Spark plan (free) allows up to 100,000 requests per day for free, and exceeding that requires upgrading to the Blaze plan (pay-as-you-go).
| Number of Requests (per day) | Price |
|---|---|
| Up to 100,000 requests | Free |
| 100,001–10,000,000 requests | $0.000006 per request |
| 10,000,001 requests and above | $0.000001 per request |
If you exceed the limit on the Spark plan for the first time, a 30-day grace period is provided, and features such as personalization, rollouts, and A/B testing integration remain free on both Spark and Blaze plans.
Projects currently in use have been given a grace period of several additional months beyond September 1, so there is no need to rush, but since Remote Config was one of the few completely free products in Firebase, the impact is expected to be wide. Apps with high fetch frequencies should check their request counts early.
OSS
Self-Made Obfuscation Tool "Kura" Released
Having been troubled by build instability on Xcode Cloud caused by Ruby dependencies in cocoapods-keys and Arkana, I developed and released "Kura," a pure-Swift CLI tool that eliminates those dependencies.
It obfuscates secrets from .env files using XOR and a salt to generate type-safe Swift code. However, please note that this is obfuscation, not encryption, and since the generated code also embeds the salt for decryption, the values can be recovered by anyone with access to the source or binary.
The background of its development and a comparison with existing tools are introduced in detail in the following article:
Summary
This time, I covered the following topics: the resolution of a large number of known issues in Xcode 27 / iOS 27 Beta 4, the impact on app maintenance including the deprecation of canOpenURL(_:), the republication of the "Design Principles" page, the addition of the iOS Simulator panel to Claude Code Desktop, the Firebase Remote Config pricing changes, and the release of the self-made obfuscation tool "Kura." In particular, since many apps are likely built on the assumption that Remote Config is free, I would like to check the impact as early as possible.
Since information surrounding iOS app development changes rapidly, I plan to write another article the next time notable changes accumulate.
Job Listings: Classmethod is Hiring iOS Engineers
The Starbucks Digital Technology division is looking for engineers capable of iOS app development. We look forward to applications from those who want to work with us while sharing information about new Xcode and iOS features in the misc-ios channel!
We are also hiring iOS/Android engineers in other areas. Let's talk about mobile app development together!
