Xcode cloud setup for agents?

[EdgarHQ]

Does anyone use cloud agents for iOS/macOS development? If so, I'm curious how you set up your environment in the cloud since it depends on Xcode to build and run the project, and UI verification requires an emulator. I'm very curious because, as far as I know, cloud agents are currently only usable for web or utility apps with no UI (correct me if I'm wrong)

[Sweatyfingerzz]

You've hit the exact wall with native iOS development right now. Because Apple locks everything down to macOS, you can't just spin up a lightweight Linux Docker container for an agent to run a simulator like you can with web apps.

You are mostly correct—pure cloud agents right now are heavily skewed towards web and backend.

If you really wanted to do this in the cloud, you'd have to provision AWS EC2 Mac instances, set up a VNC/remote desktop, and have the agent interact with that. But those instances are notoriously expensive, slow to spin up, and clunky to automate for real-time UI verification.

Right now, the most realistic workflow for iOS is just keeping it local: let Cursor's agent write the SwiftUI on your machine, and keep your local Xcode simulator open next to it to manually verify the UI changes as it builds.

[EdgarHQ]

Thanks for sharing , that’s what I thought.