project does not know how to run the profile with the name ipad and command mobile

Question

Get this message on debugging project with ipad. Cannot debug even an empty iOS net maui project? This has been going on with several previous versions of visual insiders 26

Answer 1

Hi @Nick Hunter-blair ,

Thanks for reaching out.

In most cases, this error isn’t caused by your app code. It typically indicates that Visual Studio doesn’t recognize the selected iOS run profile (for example, the iPad profile using the mobile command). Even with an empty .NET MAUI iOS project, this kind of problem is usually linked to tooling or configuration rather than the project itself.

A few things worth checking:

• Make sure the .NET MAUI and iOS workloads are fully installed and up to date.
• Verify that your Xcode version and iOS simulators are compatible with the MAUI version you’re using.
• Try deleting the bin/obj folders and restarting Visual Studio.
• If you’re using Visual Studio Insiders, this can sometimes be related to preview regressions - switching temporarily to the stable Visual Studio channel can help isolate the issue.
• Re-select the iOS target (simulator or device) to force Visual Studio to recreate the run profile.

Since you mentioned this has been happening across several Insider builds, it still strongly suggests a tooling issue rather than anything missing in your project setup. Even though Visual Studio 2026 has a stable release, some developers continue to see iOS/.NET MAUI tooling issues in certain scenarios.

If the error persists after checking the above, a practical workaround is to continue using Visual Studio 2022, which is known to be stable for iOS .NET MAUI development, while this behavior is investigated or addressed in newer versions.

Hope this helps! If my answer was helpful - kindly follow the instructions here so others with the same problem can benefit as well.