Hi Device Hub, bye RocketSim? Definitely not!

Yes, I was scared when Apple first announced Xcode’s Device Hub at WWDC. Would I need to look for a job again? Feeling like you might get sherlocked is scary, but it’s also a confirmation that we’re working on something special.

What seemed scary turned out to be something great: RocketSim is here to stay, and we will become an even bigger part of your development workflow.

Expanding our features to physical devices

We’re not sleeping, and we kind of expected things to move in this direction. We didn’t know about Device Hub specifically, but we noticed the advantages inside the devicectl command line tool. That made us start implementing physical device support, and we already support many features in internal betas.

You’ll soon be able to welcome many of the features you know from the Simulator today, but for physical devices.

How about the side window?

Well, that’s an interesting one. The Device Hub window is large, and there might not be room for the side window. However, I’m keen to see how it’s actually going to be used. We’re actively exploring how to work around this new way of testing apps, and there’s no final goodbye (yet) to the side window.

Xcode Device Hub does not seem to work for me?

We had that at first as well! I’m currently at WWDC, and the great thing is that you can meet engineers at the labs. I spoke with one of the Simulator engineers, and he gave me the command that fixed it all:

killall -9 CoreDeviceService

This force-restarts the CoreDeviceService daemon that Device Hub and devicectl rely on, which clears up the connection issues you might hit in this first release. I can also tell you that I lost all my worries about the future of RocketSim after playing around more with all the internals.

When can we expect a RocketSim update?

Promises are tricky, but I’m hoping to release a first update in the App Store next week that will bring back a working version of RocketSim.

Feel free to reach out on X/Twitter or open an issue on GitHub if you run into anything or have ideas for how RocketSim should fit into Device Hub. Thanks!