[macOS] Xcode 12.5 will be removed from Big Sur on October, 18

[miketimofeev]

Breaking changes

Xcode 12.5 will be removed from macOS 11 Big Sur on October, 18

Target date

The deployment will start on October, 18 and will take 2-3 days

The motivation for the changes

According to our Software and image guidelines
old patch Xcode versions are deprecated in 3 months, which have already passed since Xcode 12.5.1 release on 21 Jun 2021.

Possible impact

Your project CI will be broken if it depends on Xcode 12.5

Virtual environments affected

• Ubuntu 16.04
• Ubuntu 18.04
• Ubuntu 20.04
• macOS 10.15
• macOS 11
• Windows Server 2016
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022

Mitigation ways

Migrate your project to Xcode 12.5.1 or Xcode 13.

[benr75]

Commenting here as an App Center User dependent on these images and with the decisions made recently App Center will be an unsustainable solution to rely on to build iOS applications. Current App Center build configurations list support for the below Xcode versions. Currently only the ones I've bolded will actually create a build a user can install on iOS 15. The other Xcodes listed in the 12 series build on the 10.15 images and will produce builds that cannot be installed on iOS 15 due to code signing changes that were made by Apple and available in macOS 11. App development companies and internal teams depend on App Center to build and distribute - there are reasons that certain apps cannot be brought up to the version Microsoft would like to support including 3rd party libraries that have not been rebuilt. Is Microsoft planning on getting rid of App Center as a tool? These decisions make it unusable for many development teams. Since iOS 15 came out we have been unable to build using App Center for our customers.

13.0
12.5.1
12.5
12.4
12.3
12.2
12.1.1
12.1
12.5
12.4
12.3
12.2
12.1.1
12.1
12.0.1
11.7
11.7
11.6
11.5
11.4.1
11.3.1
11.3
11.2.1
11.2
11.2
10.3
10.2.1
10.2
10.1
10.0
9.4.1

[allschu]

@benr75 we have exactly this problem. We had to fall back to Azure Devops in order to build and sign our releases. App Center is becoming very frustrating to work with.

[woodrufs]

+1 from my team, too. We still have a react-native app that is on 0.59.10, and this won't run with Xcode 13 as the react-native-cli uses tools that no longer exist in Xcode 13. There is no patch for that. Can we please postpone this removal for 12.5.1?

[miketimofeev]

@woodrufs only Xcode 12.5 will be removed, Xcode 12.5.1 will be left on the image without any changes.

[woodrufs]

@miketimofeev - thank you for clarifying! Sorry, I completely glossed over that in your original ticket.

[dibir-magomedsaygitov]

The PR has been merged. Image with the removed Xcode 12.5 version should be available with the next week's image rollout. I'll post an update message.

[zhiqingchen]

When will xcode 13 be used by default?

[miketimofeev]

@zhiqingchen later this week. We will update this issue when it's done.

[miketimofeev]

The image has been deployed.

[benr75]

@miketimofeev - where would be an appropriate venue to have a conversation about the issue I raise in my above comment? App Center folks are deferring to this group to raise issues. We migrated over 20 apps to App Center and were running smoothly and with the release of iOS 15 are dead in the water for Adhoc distribution. Leaving this comment here to hopefully point others with the same issue to the right venue or maybe a final official response.

[miketimofeev]

@benr75 just to clarify — do you need all the xcodes from the list to exist on macOS-11 image?
#4183 (comment)

[benr75]

@miketimofeev no we do not need all of those in the image - the list I provide shows all the versions of Xcode that App Center offers. Anyone building on a non-bold version will create a totally valid adhoc binary that is improperly signed. For our group we are interested specifically in 12.1 and 12.3.

[miketimofeev]

@benr75 got it. We will discuss this internally and come up with a decision.

[miketimofeev]

@benr75 could you explain your use case in a bit more detail, please? It's not clear to us why do you need to sign (?) something using not the latest version of Xcode.

[benr75]

@miketimofeev Our software solutions rely on 3rd party SDKs. In order to move to new versions of Xcode our code and the code of our partners needs to be updated in order to build on newer versions of Xcode. Apple makes breaking changes between releases requiring different approaches and although it is on our roadmap to run on Xcode 13 we currently have dependencies that do not. Apple still accepts binaries built on older versions of Xcode and it is not unusual - ESPECIALLY for larger, longer running projects - to be a couple versions of Xcode behind.

[miketimofeev]

@benr75 thanks! Could you please create an issue with the "Tool request" type about the Xcode versions you need and provide the same reason there. We will discuss it with AppCenter folks then because it's easy to add the version to the image but not that easy to switch say Xcode 12.3 builds to run not on 10.15 but on 11 in appcenter as it may break some current Xcode 12.3 customers.