Xcode 26 Beta 3
Xcode 26 beta 3 includes SDKs for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26, watchOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, and visionOS 26.
This is the only change that’s noted as being in beta 3. Why can’t Apple write release notes that tell us what’s actually new in this build?
The Beta 3 SDK adds support for
Glass.clear, which looks like the glass material used more commonly throughout the system in Beta 1 and 2 of iOS 26. Less contrast, more glass-like.
The download page says it requires macOS 15.4 or later, but Xcode’s Info.plist says it requires 15.5. The Info.plist is always correct.
[…]
Most importantly, #Xcode 26.0 beta 3 sees the return of the “BETA” badge on its app icon!
Whoop whoop! Now we can finally find a workaround for this 😬
I still can’t create a release build of my app in Xcode 26 beta 3 on Tahoe beta 3 due to a “swift-frontend” error. After three betas of this, I’m starting to worry that I won’t be able to release an updated build for Tahoe!
It looks like beta 3 may have fixed a problem I was having with Swift Testing, but it also brought a flurry of SourceKit crashes when editing code.
My Xcode beta 3 installed yesterday seemingly forgot I had the iOS 26 SDK installed today and I had to reinstall it.
Kinda feels like nothing on my computer is mine, ya know? It’s all being managed externally by unknown entities and changes on a whim. Can’t trust anything to just…. be left alone.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-10): Matt Gallagher:
Following up on this: all but one of the hundreds of these warnings I had in Xcode 26 beta 2 are gone in Xcode 26 beta 3.
I think a Swift bug failing to detect a
TaskwasMainActorisolated was the biggest cause.
Update (2025-07-11): Howard Oakley:
If you’re building apps using Xcode 26 beta on macOS 26 beta, you should beware of the combination of their third betas. If you’re unlucky like me, you’ll discover those shiny new app icons generated by Icon Composer no longer work on any older version of macOS. This is mentioned in the Xcode 26 b3 release notes, and the workaround given is “none”.
Update (2025-07-22): Frank Illenberger:
I’ve just spent an hour getting Xcode 26b3 to open my project on macOS Tahoe without crashing.
[…]
It shoes that while Xcode accessing the NSSpellChecker singleton for the first time on a background thread, some AppKit UI code is executed. This then runs into an assertion which protects against UI code running on non-main threads.
[…]
But I found a way to work around this issue: I created a new Xcode project with an RTF file and performed a spell-check in its editor.
Another thing I don’t like about Tahoe is the version number it returns. It should return 16 for lower SDKs and 26 when using the 26 SDK, just like what Apple did with macOS 11 (returned 10.16 if not using the 11 SDK).
This seemed to work in previous Xcode 26 betas, but it’s broken in beta 3.
This took me by surprise. The code generated by the
@Observablemacro in Xcode 26 beta 3 is noticeably different from what Xcode 16 produced.
Previously:
