Is this bait? XCode has been a mainstay of iOS development ever since iOS was introduced and is a successor to Interface Builder on the Mac.

Why wouldn’t engineers prefer tools they’ve been using (mostly happily) for a decade+?

>Is this bait?

I don't think it's a serious question or the person is very young.

To answer the question. Xcode is the default IDE for iOS development. The default option will always be a practical choice.

JetBrains or Anthropic could get bought by a larger company or dismantled by the government somehow. Should anything happen to Apple (unlikely as that may seem) the entire iOS ecosystem would be gone as well negating any need for a default.

I wish I was young! I have used Xcode in the past. It's just way too slow and anything it does, other IDEs do faster for me.

Some influential iOS devs such as @dimillian and @steipete have moved away from Xcode or even xcodebuild where possible.

Which is completely fine. However these are people with lots of experience in Xcode already. People can have preferences including default options.

What do you use instead? I thought Xcode sign-in is necessary for signing apps?

You can do the signing in Xcode Cloud. I'm sure with CLI it's possible too

There are command line tools which arguably are part of xcode, but you can drive them from the cli/ssh and don't need to interact with the xcode GUI.

how did you debug it? The CLI tools are close to useless. I never even found a way to get console output from a device without Xcode.