Hi everyone! After about 4-5 months of development, I released WatchBlocks v1.5 today. The project started as an experiment to answer a simple question: Could you build a real sandbox survival game that runs well on Apple Watch? It eventually grew into a cross-platform game supporting Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Some of the technical challenges I enjoyed solving included: Optimizing rendering and gameplay for watchOS. Designing controls around the Digital Crown and the watch display. Building multiplayer across Apple platforms. Creating a content system that lets players make and share their own blocks, items, mobs, and biomes. The new update also transitions the game to a free-to-start model, making it easier for people to try it before deciding whether to unlock the full experience. I’d love to hear from other developers building for watchOS. It’s a platform that doesn’t get much attention for games, but I think there’s a lot of untapped potential. If anyone has questions about developing games for Apple Watch, I’m happy to answer them. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/watchblocks-craft-build/id6760209351

Hello, I use a Gigabyte M32U monitor with my Mac mini. After updating to macOS Golden Gate 27 Release 3, I started experiencing an issue with my external display. Whenever I turn my monitor off and then turn it back on, the refresh rate automatically changes from 144Hz to 98Hz, and the 144Hz option disappears from the display settings. However, if I unplug the display cable and plug it back in, the monitor is detected again and the 144Hz option returns, allowing me to select it normally. This issue only started after updating to macOS Golden Gate 27 Release 3. Before the update, the monitor consistently worked at 144Hz without any problems. Could you please investigate this issue? Thank you.

Hello everyone, I am posting this to determine whether other iPad Pro M4 users are experiencing the same issue. Device: iPad Pro 11-inch (M4) Original Apple charger Tested on multiple iPadOS versions, stebal and beta including 26.2, 26.3, 26.4, 26.5.2 Games Tested: BGMI PUBG Mobile Global Call of Duty: Mobile Fortnite Issue: Despite using one of Apple's most powerful tablets, I continue to experience gaming performance problems. The issues include: FPS drops during long gaming sessions. Frame pacing inconsistencies. Reduced responsiveness during intense fights. Inconsistent hit registration and spray accuracy after extended play. Performance sometimes changes when gaming while charging with the original Apple charger. I have tested multiple iPadOS versions and multiple game updates over several months, but the issue has never been completely resolved. Interestingly, iPadOS feels more consistent for me than some previous versions, but the overall gaming experience is still not what I would expect from the M4 hardware. I have also noticed that many other iPad Pro M4 users have reported similar concerns on Reddit, Apple Communities, and other gaming forums. Questions: Are other iPad Pro M4 users experiencing the same FPS drops and gameplay inconsistencies? Has anyone found a reliable solution? Is Apple aware of these gaming performance issues on the M4 iPad Pro? Is this an iPadOS optimization issue, a GPU scheduling issue, or something related to game optimization? I hope Apple and game developers investigate this further because the M4 hardware should be capable of delivering a consistently excellent gaming experience. Thank you.

On the new M5 Pro platform running macOS, UI animations (window dragging, Safari/Chrome scrolling, Mission Control) on an external 5K 165Hz display appear to render at a much lower frame rate (~60Hz) or exhibit severe micro-stuttering. However, the mouse cursor and desktop wallpaper dragging remain perfectly fluid at 165Hz, indicating a potential issue in the WindowServer compositor or display pipeline rather than the physical link. Environment • Hardware: MacBook Pro (M5 Pro) • OS: macOS 27.0 beta 3 (26A5378j) • External Display: 5K 165Hz monitor connected via DisplayPort (DSC confirmed via IORegistry). System Settings correctly detects and selects 165Hz. Expected Behavior All UI elements, including window movement, application scrolling, and system animations, should render smoothly at the native 165Hz refresh rate matching the hardware capabilities. Actual Behavior The display output appears split between two different refresh rates: 1. Full 165Hz: The hardware mouse cursor and desktop dragging (empty area selection) are perfectly smooth. 2. ~60Hz / Jitter: Application windows (Finder, Safari, Chrome) stutter heavily when dragged or scrolled. Mission Control animations suffer from micro-stutters. Note: This specific combination suggests the Hardware Cursor layer is running at full rate, but the WindowServer compositor layer is throttled or dropping frames. Troubleshooting Performed (No Change) • Verified with multiple certified DisplayPort cables. • Tested across various resolutions (Scaled/HiDPI modes) and toggling DSC. • Regression Check: This issue did not occur on a 4K 144Hz HDR monitor previously, and initial community feedback shows other M5 Pro users experiencing this specific 165Hz window-dragging jitter, while M4 Pro / base M5 users on the same macOS beta do not seem impacted. Questions & Diagnostics 1. Is this a known regression related to the new M5 Pro display engine / Display Coprocessor (DCP) pipeline handling 5K high-refresh-rate timings? 2. Are there specific defaults write commands, Quartz Debug profiles, or custom logging arguments (WindowServer, DCP, or Metal) we can enable to capture frame presentation metrics? I have captured a sysdiagnose, IORegistry dump, and high-frame-rate screen recordings, and am ready to attach them as soon as this feedback is processed. Case / Feedback Reference Feedback ID: FB23616959 (Captured after the system format)

I was wondering if there's a method on MacOS to have my application hide a hid device such as a game controller and instead have the receiving game/application see my app's virtual controller? Is this possible via DriverKit or some other form of kernel level coding? On Windows we have a tool known as HidHide that hids a game controller from all other applications. Is it possible to implement such behavior into an app or is that system level?

Environment: macOS 26.5, M4 Pro, native SwiftUI app (no MTKView/game render loop; it does use SwiftUI Metal shader effects). There's a related scheduling puzzle underneath: my app's worker threads are confined to E-cores for work that runs on P-cores from a CLI. The game computes AI decisions with brief CPU-bound bursts of parallel tree search. The identical library, doing node-count-identical work, runs ~6× slower inside the app than from a CLI on the same machine — the difference is core placement, not the workload. And since several bot decisions run in sequence each hand, that 6× stacks into user-visible seconds at the table: CLI process, default QoS: ~54ms per decision (P-cores) GUI app, worker threads at .userInitiated and .userInteractive: ~350ms (E-cores) Reproducible from the CLI with taskpolicy clamps: utility ≈ 92ms, background ≈ 584ms The app declares LSApplicationCategoryType = public.app-category.card-games and GCSupportsGameMode = true, and runs native full screen as the frontmost app on Apple Silicon — but Game Mode never engages (no menu-bar controller icon). Questions: What are the actual activation criteria for Game Mode? Is a game-style render surface (e.g. MTKView/CAMetalLayer) required beyond the Info.plist declarations? Is E-core placement for a GUI app's non-main-thread compute intended scheduler policy even at userInteractive QoS? What is the supported way for a GUI app to run brief, user-blocking compute on P-cores — is Game Mode the intended lever, or should I be looking at something like os_workgroup?

I ma trying to figure out if there is a Boolean subtraction functionality native in SceneKit or RealityKit. Simple operation like cutting a hole in a box from a sphere. If not, are there any libraries (free) that I can look into?

When I enter webp image to the assets catalog I get warrning: /Users/..../Assets.xcassets The image set "Card-Back" references a file "Card-Back.webp", but that file does not have a valid extension. It works, I see all my images perfect. How can I fix the 200+ warrnings?

Hi everyone, I’ve spent the last 2 months pulling off a wild solo experiment: building a complete mobile puzzle game from scratch using Unreal Engine, where over 100k lines of code (C++ & pipelines) and thousands of 3D/UI assets were entirely generated by various AI models. Before anyone rolls their eyes—no, AI didn't replace the game designer here. AI provided the brute-force production muscle, but I gave it its soul. Every single bit of core design—the underlying math models, difficulty pacing, and counter-mechanics for the dynamic gimmick bosses—was designed and balanced by me. The game itself is a tactical, gimmick-boss driven match-3. I got tired of the usual candy-coated reskins and wanted to make something with rigid logic, irregular board topologies, and tight move economies for people who actually like strategic puzzle-solving. I’m currently running a closed beta via TestFlight on iOS to stress-test the build, and I'd love to get some brutal feedback from fellow devs. (Just a heads up: save progress won't carry over to final release). You can grab the build directly here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/VnUWvHFC I’m specifically looking for insights on: Performance & Thermals: How does the UE rendering pipeline handle on your device during heavy chain reactions? Aesthetic Cohesion: Does an all-AI asset pipeline manage to feel like a unified universe, or do you feel that "AI uncanny valley"? Balance: Do the non-Euclidean layouts and boss disruption mechanics feel strategic or just plain frustrating? I'll be hanging out in the comments. Drop any questions you have about prompt-engineering a 100k-line codebase, solo pipeline management, or UE integration. Thanks for testing!

Hi everyone, I’ve spent the last 2 months pulling off a wild solo experiment: building a complete mobile puzzle game from scratch using Unreal Engine, where over 100k lines of code (C++ & pipelines) and thousands of 3D/UI assets were entirely generated by various AI models. Before anyone rolls their eyes—no, AI didn't replace the game designer here. AI provided the brute-force production muscle, but I gave it its soul. Every single bit of core design—the underlying math models, difficulty pacing, and counter-mechanics for the dynamic gimmick bosses—was designed and balanced by me. The game itself is a tactical, gimmick-boss driven match-3. I got tired of the usual candy-coated reskins and wanted to make something with rigid logic, irregular board topologies, and tight move economies for people who actually like strategic puzzle-solving. I’m currently running a closed beta via TestFlight on iOS to stress-test the build, and I'd love to get some brutal feedback from fellow devs. (Just a heads up: save progress won't carry over to final release). You can grab the build directly here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/VnUWvHFC I’m specifically looking for insights on: Performance & Thermals: How does the UE rendering pipeline handle on your device during heavy chain reactions? Aesthetic Cohesion: Does an all-AI asset pipeline manage to feel like a unified universe, or do you feel that "AI uncanny valley"? Balance: Do the non-Euclidean layouts and boss disruption mechanics feel strategic or just plain frustrating? I'll be hanging out in the comments. Drop any questions you have about prompt-engineering a 100k-line codebase, solo pipeline management, or UE integration. Thanks for testing!

What's the recommended pattern for sharing a complex SpriteKit game scene (and basic game code) between iOS and watchOS targets without code duplication, given the platform differences in input and rendering?

Hi! Question Could you provide some reassurance on the continued support for SpriteKit in the coming years? Trigger The deprecation of SceneKit at WWDC 2025 made me nervous. Context I use SpriteKit because: It can render any video AVFoundation can handle, which third-party engines don't do for several reasons including patents. This allows me to prototype UI that controls video with a game-like feel. It can render text and emojis through AttributedString, and text is hard. Thanks to a clear and well-exposed update loop, it can be integrated with libraries such as Core Image or Box2D. Example with Box2D here. It can draw dynamic shapes and paths with SKShapeNode, and visualize and respond to all the processing done at specific times during a frame. SKView is very handy to generate textures from nodes, and SKRenderer can be used to render a SpriteKit scene to video or sequence of images. This is possible thanks to multiple frameworks working together, including AVAssetWriter and IOSurface. Example of SpriteKit offline rendering here. Apple Alternatives When Apple announced the deprecation of SceneKit, I learned RealityKit in order to move my SpriteKit-based projects to RealityKit. RealityKit is interesting, but for 2D and 2.5D workflows I found several areas where SpriteKit remains significantly more practical: I had to lock physics to the XY plane, which could stress the engine and introduce unwanted overlap. Overlapping entities on a 2D plane was hard: ModelSortGroup did not provide the simple flexibility that SpriteKit zPosition provides. AFAIK there is no dynamic path/shape drawing in RealityKit. So drawing lines, visualizing physics and joints, rendering graph connections in the scene is not as easy as it is with SpriteKit shape nodes. SpriteKit is lighter and less power-hungry. Let me know if you need any more context or detail. Thank you!

The developer documentation for Rosetta describing its end of support (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/about-the-rosetta-translation-environment) says the following: Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks. Are there details about which specific functionality this is? And as a concrete example, will parts of Rosetta that are needed by programs used to run and/or evaluate Windows games, such as WINE or CrossOver, remain supported?

My app contains hundreds of games, each of which would benefit from its own set of achievements, leaderboards, etc. Is there any hope for minigame support in GameKit?

I've coded a text-adventure game in SwiftUI. (My game has no graphics or sound effects.) My app already supports keyboard navigation; I would like to add support for game controllers on iPhone. I can't figure out how to do it. I especially can't see any way to allow controller users to enter text in a TextField. I've read https://developer.apple.com/documentation/gamecontroller/supporting-game-controllers and it's all about button events. There's no reference to SwiftUI at all in that documentation, or any input-method editing at all. The only mention of "keyboard" is about treating the keyboard itself as if it were a game controller providing button events. How do I implement this?

I guess this is not an actual video Group Lab. sigh Would love to see a dedicated Reality Composer Pro 3 session - even for those of use actual Vision Pro devs that didn't get the lucky golden ticket to the Apple Park event. You need to make these interactions available to us in person during WWDC week. That all being said... How do I go about baking lighting in RCP3? I cannot find anything in the documentation. Thanks!

If you have a "launcher-type app" (a regular macOS app bundle) which is used to launch the actual game executable (a non-bundled executable, such as a Java game), Game Mode does not seem to work as desired in this case. If the launcher app has the appropriate LSSupportsGameMode and LSApplicationCategoryType set, the launcher app will activate Game Mode if fullscreened but the actual game will not (FB18026957). Is there a workaround for this? It also seems like the system hardcodes some apps to act as "game launcher apps" which do have the desired behavior - for example, if you have a sample app set to Steam's bundle identifier (or just use Steam to run the program) and have this architecture where it runs another executable which is the real game, then that game can inherit Game Mode, which is also supported by system logs in Console (note the "launcher" labelReason): default 17:11:05.008533-0400 gamepolicyd Found game GameProcess(Optional("java"), pid=33754, euid=501, labelReason=launcher, launchedBy=Steam) Is there a way to opt into or apply for this behavior for our own apps? I previously asked this on the forums but I'm also wondering if any new developments have occurred since then.

One of my users updated his iPhone 16 Pro to iOS 26.5, and Apple TV to tvOS 26.5, both of them unable to pair a Microsoft Xbox One (Model 1708) gamepad, before updating (updated from iOS 18.x) it works normally. He also got an old iPhone on iOS 16.7 which was working fine with that gamepad. Any one met the same issue? feedback no. FB22809309

Our application is trying to read all resolutions of an external monitor. We have observed that, for the external monitor there is a mismatch in resolution list in our application and the resolution list in system settings. We are using the apple API "CGDisplayCopyAllDisplayModes" to read the resolutions.

Hi, I have a game which is available on iOS and tvOS and the gameplay is basically the same on both platforms. I'd like to enable my players to seamlessly continue their play sessions on all available platforms. Unfortunately, the new GameSave framework is not available on tvOS and neither is the old GKSavedGame API. I'm asking you to enable the new GameSave framework in a future version of tvOS. Thank you. I've also reported via Feedback Assistant with Feedback Number: FB22791051