For difficult reasons I won’t get into, I ended up manually downloading the latest iOS 26 simulator runtime. I now have a file named 78756498-8AB4-4E5A-986C-7AA435758657.aar copied to my Mac.
How do I get this archive installed so Xcode 26 recognizes it as a proper simulator runtime component?
All searching I‘ve done for manually installing simulators references dmg files and older versions of Xcode. There’s no mention of aar files.
When I tried the command:
sudo xcrun simctl runtime add ./78756498-8AB4-4E5A-986C-7AA435758657.aar
I get the result:
An error was encountered processing the command (domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain, code=22):
Error while creating AEA backend
Invalid argument
I tried to use Archive Utility to open the file but that just says it is unable to expand the file.
I even tried renaming the file with a dmg extension and then tried mounting the file and I get the same “AEA backend” error.
My Mac doesn’t have sufficient Internet access to let me download and install this normally through Xcode. I need to find a way to get this file installed manually.