We have developed a Parental/Self control app using Screen time API. We have used individual authentication to authorize the app, using the instructions here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/familycontrols/authorizationcenter The problem is , that individual auth can be disabled easily , by the following steps: enter Settings app. in Settings app, click on the Parental/Self control app. click to disable screen time restriction. show the device owner's face/fingerprint. (or pin code) Why is that a problem: Parental control apps, or self-control apps, are about giving control to the software, To make it hard for the user to disable the restrictions. So using the flow I have introduced above, it's super-easy for a user to disable his Parental control restrictions, which misses the entire point of Parental/Self control idea. Furthermore, not only the user have the means to unlock his screen time restrictions, he also MUST have the means to unlock it. This makes Screen time (with individual auth) useless: I have a code ready to make a great parental control app for my clients, with amazing ideas, but I can't use the Screen time API unless this problem is fixed. Why child-parent auth is not enough: My clients are grownups people between ages of 15-40, that are interested in self-control, so they don't have iCloud child accounts. also, the child-parent auth solution forces my clients to give some control to other person, and my clients prefer their privacy. Some of them prefer self-control and not parental-control. What I suggest as a solution: 1: Give more options to users how to disable the Screen time restrictions. including: a second faceID / FingerPrint (that isn't the same as the one used to unlock the device) a second pin password. a string password 2: Give the users the option to choose to not have the device's owner Face/Finger/Pincode ID , as a method to disable the Screen time restrictions.

Hello everyone, I’d like to propose Sense & Store — a seamless integration between Safari and the App Store, powered by on-device AI, designed to understand what users are reading, searching, or selecting in Safari, and suggest relevant apps that match their current context or intention. 🔍 Key Idea: “Sense” the user’s need through intelligent analysis of web content, then “Store” — offer the most relevant app, either already installed or available in the App Store. 🌟 Core Features: • AI-powered context detection directly inside Safari • Real-time app suggestions based on user intent • Smart overlays when selecting text or data (e.g., phone numbers, emails, tools) • Privacy-first: All AI runs on-device (Apple Neural Engine) • Instant App Launch or Installation via StoreKit ✅ Examples: • Reading an article on productivity? → Suggests Notion or Things. • Looking up meditation tips? → Recommends Calm or Headspace. • Selecting a phone number? → Offers CRM or spam blocker apps. • Exploring code samples? → Suggests Pythonista or developer tools. 🔒 Privacy & Performance: • 100% on-device intelligence (no data sent to servers) • Follows Apple’s privacy framework • Works with SafariKit + StoreKit + CoreML ⸻ I’m happy to provide a full prototype roadmap and technical architecture. Feedback and collaboration are welcome! Would love to hear your thoughts — especially from developers who build for Safari, App Clips, or work with CoreML. Thanks! by: Apple lover....

Hi, We have a need to provide SIM verification. At present, accessing the phone number bound to the device is not programmatically accessible. Would Apple consider exposing this API via a user consent? Otherwise, what is the suggested approach to verify the SIM card is the correct phone number on an iOS device?

When using libXML2 to parse HTML, by default, libXML2 normalizes and merges whitespace characters (including line breaks) on text nodes, which can cause line breaks within tags such as,, script, style, etc. to be removed or merged. But for tags like, line breaks and whitespace are meaningful and need to be preserved.

Hey, I am just about to prepare my app for Swift 6, and facing the issue that UserDefaults is not Sendable. The documentation states that its thread safe, so I am wondering, why is it not marked as Sendable? Was it just forgotten? Is it safe to mark it as nonisolated(unsafe) or @unchecked Sendable?

Hi all, I'm trying to add Spotlight support to a macOS app that handles custom virtual machine bundles with the .vpvm extension. I’ve followed the current documentation and used the modern CSImportExtension approach with a Spotlight Importer extension target. Here’s what I’ve done: App Info.plist: Declared com.makeprog.vpvm as a UTI conforming to com.apple.package. Registered it under UTExportedTypeDeclarations and CFBundleDocumentTypes. Spotlight Importer Extension: Added a new macOS target using the Spotlight Import Extension template. Set the NSExtensionPointIdentifier to com.apple.spotlight.import. Used CSSupportedContentTypes = com.makeprog.vpvm. Implemented a minimal update(_ attributes:forFileAt:) method that sets displayName, title, and contentDescription. Other steps: Verified that the .appex is embedded under Contents/PlugIns/. Confirmed it appears in mdimport -e output with correct UTI. Used mdimport -m -d2 -t /path/to/file.vpvm, but I still get: Imported '/path/to/file.vpvm' of type 'com.makeprog.vpvm' with no plugIn. The extension is never invoked. I’ve also tried: Ensuring the .vpvm file is a valid directory bundle. Restarting Spotlight / rebuilding index. Ensuring the app and extension are properly signed. Tried installing the app in test virtual machine Question: Has anyone successfully used CSImportExtension for custom UTIs? Is there something additional I need to do for the extension to be recognized and triggered? Any advice or examples would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

We are developing a parental control application in SwiftUI with features like app blocking and screen time management. We are using the Family Control API along with Apple Family Sharing, allowing parents to add multiple children to the family group. We have followed the apple documentation still we are facing following issues: App Blocking Issue: The family picker does not display each child's name separately or their apps individually. Instead, it shows all children's apps together, making it difficult to block apps for a specific child. Screen Time Data Issue: We receive the total screen time usage for all children combined rather than separate screen time data for each child. Syncing Delay: When a new child is added to the Family Sharing group, we are unsure how long it takes for their apps to sync and appear on the parent’s device.

We are using VZVirtualMachine instances in a Swift actor. It works fine but we hit a major problem when we decided that we want to attach it to a VZVirtualMachineView to show it / allow user interactions. VZVirtualMachineView and its virtualMachine property is isolated to @MainActor, so if we directly assign our vm instance to it, we receive a concurrency error: @MainActor public func createView() -> VZVirtualMachineView { let view = VZVirtualMachineView() view.virtualMachine = vm // x: Actor-isolated property 'vm' can not be referenced from the main actor return view } Is there any way we can make this work?

When selecting a stroke path for object on PKCanvas, the option "Snap to Shape" appears. I understand this function is still in beta and has not made available natively to other PencilKit app. Is there a way using Stroke API to call this function directly after the user hold pencil for half a second when stroke is done drawing, just like how it behaves in native apps?

Hi, I didn't find any mentions in the doc about disabling the option for snoozing in an alarm. Although you can create an alarm without a snooze button using AlarmKit, the user can still snooze by clicking on the volume button, for example.

reposting this in case it got missed the first time around here https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/775900 We had a question that came up when we comparing data from WeatherKit to other sources - WeatherKit visibility was well beyond the boundaries we had historically, even from Darksky. That raises two questions: is visibility actually in meters like the docs say? is this visibility at ground level, 500ft, or some other height? We were seeing visibility numbers of up to 40 miles (after converting the number the API sent to miles), where all of our other sources are usually within 10 miles

I'm pretty excited for the all new iOS 26 redesign, but what I'm most excited for is the call screening feature to avoid unwanted calls. I downloaded the developer's beta on my secondary device to report bugs, but call screening doesn't work on it even though it's turned on. I already sent a feedback report, but I'm not sure if it's just a beta bug or that my iPhone won't support it. I haven't found much info about it. It's a 2nd gen SE. Thanks.

I am trying to set up a message filter extension that will use shared web credentials for basic auth when calling to its ILMessageFilterExtensionNetworkURL. I have associated domains set up for both "messagefilter:" and "webcredentials:" and the message filter IS correctly calling the ILMessageFilterExtensionNetworkURL with each message - so that part is working. As detailed here, I have set up Shared Web Credentials and my view controller is using SecAddSharedWebCredential() to save the creds to the correct domain. Using Authorization services, the creds are auto-filled into my app's login screen. When I go under Settings > Passwords, I see the creds are saved and they are the correct creds to the corrent website that matches ILMessageFilterExtensionNetworkURL. Regardless of all of this, the deferQueryRequestToNetwork() refuses to use the creds and implement Basic Auth in its URL call. It makes the call to the correct URL, it just won't use the Shared Web Creds for basic auth. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

My app already has UI that allows the user to show/hide a menubar icon. If the user disallows my app's icon via System Settings > Menu Bar > Allow in the menu bar, I'd like to customize my own UI to reflect that. Does macOS provide a way for me to determine the "Allow in the menu bar" state for my application?

Hey there, I have a slight problem which is also known on the web, but I couldn't find any answers... My iOS App is working with documents like pdf and images. It is made to handle invoices and upload them to an external service. The app's job is to compress those pdfs and images. Sadly the PDFKit's PDFDocument increases its size just after importing it with pdfDocument = PDFDocument(url: url) and later exporting it to an pdf file again with data = pdf.dataRepresentation() without ever modifying it. It increases by server KB after each export. Do you have any alternatives to the renderer dataRepresentation() or a general PDFKit alternative Thanks

Is there any way to find the reason for a CRASHING_DUE_TO_PRIVACY_VIOLATION from a crash report? It does not happen on my old iPad Air 2 and it does not happen on the simulators with the latest iOS. But it crashes always on newer real devices to which I have no access. The last app review for the AppStore also did not find it. I added some privacy strings by guessing and sent it via TestFlight but it doesn't change anything.

I am wanting to not only surface my content in the system-level Spotlight search results but also to utilize the same index for my in-app search screen. The very few examples or tutorials I could find all craft a CSSearchQuery string using just the "title" attribute. I can't figure out where to look to understand how to search across other attributes. My most pressing need is to be able to perform a CSSearchQuery looking for a search term in the .htmlContentData attribute. If I search for this term in the system search field it returns results, so I know it's being indexed. However when I use a search query (in my app) like htmlContentData == "someSearchTerm" I get zero results. This frustration has led to some more general questions like: How do you know what attribute names are available to use in the search query? Is it just a string literal that's exactly the same as the CSSearchableItemAttributeSet property in Swift? e.g. property .htmlContentData is referred to as "htmlContentData" in the query string? Also, is there any way to just search across all attributes with CSSearchQuery? Obviously using the system Spotlight search (from Home Screen) you don't have to specify if you're searching the title or htmlContentData, it just finds it in either. Yet for CSSearchQuery I have to know up-front which fields I want to look in?

Hello! I’m trying to handle custom URLs (e.g., customurl://open?param=value) that open the app. However, while the app launches via the custom URL as expected, the parameters are not being passed to or are accessible from the iOS-specific implementation. Currently, if I open a custom URL via Safari, the app gets launched but the custom URL and parameters are not accessible. customurl://open?hello=test According to the iOS Docs ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/defining-a-custom-url-scheme-for-your-app#Handle-incoming-URLs ) any URLs should be passed to: func application(_ application: UIApplication, open url: URL, options: [UIApplication.OpenURLOptionsKey : Any] = [:] ) -> Bool I do not register the above application function to be called but instead this one is executed during app start with launchOptions always being nil: func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey : Any]? = nil) -> Bool This is the case regardless of if the App is started fresh or was already running in the background. My pInfo entry for the custom URL: <key>CFBundleURLTypes</key> <array> <dict> <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key> <string>Viewer</string> <key>CFBundleURLName</key> <string>dev.customurl.project</string> <key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key> <array> <string>customurl</string> </array> </dict> <dict/> </array> TLDR: How can I access the parameters, passed with the URL? Any thoughts on what I am doing wrong?

Some Apple URL schemes are documented for third-party use. It’s fine to use those URL schemes for their intended purpose. Other Apple URL schemes are not officially documented. Their use is unsupported. If you rely on such implementation details, things might work, or they might not, and that state might change over time. IMPORTANT If you ship via the App Store, pay attention to clause 2.5.1 of the App Review Guidelines. The Apple URL scheme documentation is not always easy to find. I’m aware of the following: Apple URL Scheme Reference QA1924 Opening Keyboard Settings from a Keyboard Extension [This Q&A was retired years ago.] Preparing your app to be the default messaging app The doc comments for es_new_client in <EndpointSecurity/ESClient.h> Developer > Bug Reporting describes the applefeedback scheme Additionally, as questions about this most commonly crop up in the context of opening Settings (System Settings on macOS), I wanted to highlight the following: UIApplication.openSettingsURLString property (in Objective-C this is UIApplicationOpenSettingsURLString) UIApplication.openNotificationSettingsURLString property (in Objective-C this is UIApplicationOpenNotificationSettingsURLString) UIApplication.openDefaultApplicationsSettingsURLString property (in Objective-C this is UIApplicationOpenDefaultApplicationsSettingsURLString) AccessibilitySettings.openSettings(for:) method FIFinderSyncController.showExtensionManagementInterface() class method SMAppService.openSystemSettingsLoginItems() class method VSOpenTVProviderSettingsURLString global CXCallDirectoryManager.openSettings(completionHandler:) method SFSafariSettings.openExportBrowsingDataSettings() method SFSafariSettings.openExtensionsSettings(forIdentifiers:) method If your app needs to perform some action that’s not covered by the above, file an enhancement request for a supported way to do that. Make sure to describes your use case in detail. Share and Enjoy — Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com" Revision History 2026-01-07 Added a reference to the SFSafariSettings methods. 2025-10-28 Added a reference to UIApplication.openDefaultApplicationsSettingsURLString. Made other minor editorial changes. 2025-04-21 Added a reference to CXCallDirectoryManager.openSettings(completionHandler:). 2024-10-25 Added a reference to UIApplication.openNotificationSettingsURLString and VSOpenTVProviderSettingsURLString. Added a link to Preparing your app to be the default messaging app. 2024-10-01 Added info about the applefeedback URL scheme. 2024-09-29 Added a reference to SMAppService.openSystemSettingsLoginItems(). 2024-09-27 Added a titbit for Finder Sync extension developers. Added an invitation to file feedback. 2024-08-05 First posted.

We've been using the WeatherKit API for a few years now. Everything has been pretty stable. We'll periodically get 404 errors, but they usually disappear within a couple days. Starting March 5th we've again been getting 404 errors that slowly ramped up to March 20th and continued. We have had no code changes on our end, so something seems to have changed / broken on the server side of things. Here are some example API calls that are giving us a 404 error now https://weatherkit.apple.com/api/v1/weather/en/35.9981205/-78.8920444?dataSets=forecastDaily&dailyStart=2025-03-21T05:00:00Z&timezone=America/New_York&countryCode=US https://weatherkit.apple.com/api/v1/weather/en/41.4789363/-81.7404134?dataSets=forecastDaily&dailyStart=2025-03-21T04:56:00Z&timezone=America/New_York&countryCode=US Does anyone have any insights or information on this? Also if Apple is listening, an error more meaningful than 404 would be much much appreciated.