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How to display iPhone simulators in Visual Studio for Mac?

Dev Monkey 1 Reputation point
2021-07-07T04:16:27.397+00:00

I’m trying to run an iOS project in Visual Studio for Mac Community 8.10.5.

At the top of the Visual Studio window, next to the iOS project name, I have selected Debug | iPhoneSimulator. The menu to the right of that displays a Simulator heading, and under that, Lower the ‘Deployment Target’ to see older simulators or check your Apple SDK path.

In the iOS project’s Info.plist file, the Minimum system version is set to 7.0.

I have checked the Apple SDK path under Preferences\SDK Locations\Apple, the Location is set to /Applications/Xcode.app, and the message Xcode 12.5.1 found at the system location (xcode-select) appears above that, preceded by a green tick.

I opened Xcode and looked at the listed Simulators, and there are ten iPhone simulators listed starting with "iPhone 8" and finishing at "iPhone 12 mini".

I tried adding a new simulator in Xcode with Model set to iPhone 11, closed Xcode and Visual Studio and restarted the computer. Opening Visual Studio again, there are still no iPhone simulators listed.

When I first installed Visual Studio for Mac, it did display iPhone simulators. I think they stopped being listed after one of the Visual Studio updates some time ago, and I haven’t been able to get them to reappear since.

Developer technologies | .NET | Xamarin

3 answers

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  1. Misael Monterroca 1 Reputation point Microsoft Employee
    2021-09-22T23:09:47.087+00:00

    If you Have instaled XCode13, That's the problem. You need to downgrade to Xcode 12.5

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  2. Péter Tófalvy 1 Reputation point
    2021-09-15T17:06:53.253+00:00

    Same problem for me.
    I tried to set the system version to 8 but it didn't help.

    I can't believe that this bug is not fixed since July!

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  3. Michael Leung 6 Reputation points
    2021-08-01T07:51:15.763+00:00

    Hi,

    I also face the same issue. My workaround is to set the "Minimum system version" in Visual Studio's IOS project plist to "8" instead of "8.0". Wait a minute and all iPhone simulators re-appears.

    Seems like a bug in the latest Visual Studio for Mac.

    Hope this help.

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