The Apple Developer Forums are a great place to discuss and share information about all Apple platforms. You can use the forums to interact with the community and explore the latest technologies and frameworks. Here are some tips to getting the most out of your time in the forums.

Visit the Apple Developer Forums

Learn more about the Apple Developer Forums

Personalize your profile

While anyone can browse the forums, you’ll need to sign in with your Apple ID to ask or answer questions. Once a post has been approved, the community can rank and promote it. Moderators may review posts to ensure a safe and secure platform.

Customize your profile with a preset avatar, location (if you choose), and links to your apps on the App Store. You can also personalize your homepage with the tags and threads you’re most interested in.

Just follow a few simple steps:

1. Sign into your account.
2. Go to your profile silhouette in the upper right corner of the screen.
3. Click or tap on your silhouette.
4. Click or tap Edit Profile.

From there, you can change whatever you’d like to change, as well as choose to show information like how long you’ve been on the forums.

Post like a pro

Ready to ask a question or share your insights? Here are some easy ways to maximize your post:

Provide crucial context: When posting a question, provide as much background as possible. Try to mention any relevant limitations, assumptions, or simplifications. If possible, add an image or visual aid. If you need to make a quick fix, no worries: You can edit your post for up to 30 minutes after posting.

Attach a log: Log content can add valuable additional context to your post. To add log content, click or tap on the attachment icon in the text editor. Then add a title, paste your log content, and click Add Text.

Mark it down: Take advantage of Markdown to quickly and easily style your text with headers, ordered and unordered lists, bold and italic text, links, code and syntax highlighting, blockquotes, and more.

Share and share alike: Share an original post or reply with the Share button, which can be found inline to the right of the post.

Accept your answers: If you get a great answer to your question, be sure to mark it as “accepted.” You can only mark one reply as solved, and it can’t be unmarked. (Please note you can’t solve your own question!)

Maximize tags

The forums are organized by tags: When someone asks a new question, they can add up to four tags to help categorize their post. If you have a question about building watchOS apps with SwiftUI, for example, you might tag that post SwiftUI and watchOS, and people searching either topic would get it in their search results.

Tags are listed on every post in the forums: You can view all of the most recent questions filed under a given tag by clicking or tapping on it — as well as check out any relevant technical documentation or information for that tag. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for any tag.

See all available tags on the forums

Help solve problems

Ready to help out? Reply to any post with your suggested solution. If the original author finds it useful, they can mark the question Answered — and get you reputation points. (More on those below.) If an Apple staff member agrees, they may promote your answer to Apple Recommended — and net you even more reputation. When viewing threads, you can spot Apple Recommended answers along the left side of the screen; they’re represented with a black circular logo with the Apple icon inside it.

Improve your reputation

Participating in threads and constructively providing answers helps you gain points and privileges. Your profile shows the number of Accepted answers you’ve provided; if an answer has been promoted to Apple Recommended, you’ll receive that badge on your profile as well. You can report posts for being duplicates or spam, and you can downvote questions or replies.

While on the forums, you can gain points by:

• Providing an answer marked as Apple Recommended: 25 points
• Providing a reply marked as Answered by the author: 15 points
• Asking a question that gets upvoted: 5 points
• Providing a reply that gets upvoted: 5 points

You can lose points by:

• Having an upvote for your question or reply rescinded: -5 points
• Providing a question or reply that gets downvoted: -2 points
• Posting spam or inappropriate/abusive content that gets removed: -15

Search swiftly

Use the powerful and versatile search bar to quickly find information and people in the forums. You can search by keyboard, tag, or a combination of the two.

Keyword search: Type in a word that’s three characters or longer and hit return to get question titles or descriptions related to the word (or words) you’ve typed.

Tag search: Want to search for a tag? Type it in brackets, like so: [mac]

This query will return information on tags with the word “mac” in them. Type in the name of a specific tag, and you’ll go straight to the tag’s landing page, which contains a brief description of the tag and a list of recently tagged questions.

Combination searches: If you know the name of a specific tag or multiple tags, you can combine them with a keyword to further refine your search. For example:

[macOS][Beta] Catalyst

This search will return all questions that have “Catalyst” in their title or description and are tagged with both “macOS” and “Beta.”

Categories: Not sure which tags to search? Categories group tags together to aid discoverability.

Save it for later: Want to keep tabs on a conversation even after you leave your web browser? You can watch threads and get notified via email when people post new replies to the thread.

Find a person: Want to take a look at someone’s profile? Use the following:

user:username

Replace “username” with the person’s username that you’re looking for to get a list of matching people (or, if you’ve entered an exact match, you’ll visit that person’s profile).

Follow WWDC

Posts tagged WWDC can be viewed by anyone. Share your thoughts on the conference by using the WWDC22 Community tag, or request help with conference logistics by using the WWDC22 Support tag.

Send us your feedback

We’d love to hear from you! Send feedback through Apple Developer Support or by creating a post and adding the Forums Feedback tag.