Visual Studio Mac Won't Show iOS Simulators

Question

I've got a Xamarin Forms solution with iOS and Android projects. The iOS side was working, I switched over and did a bunch of work on the Android side. Now I need to do some more iOS stuff (push notifications) and I can't get the iOS Simulator to kick in. Xcode is installed, VS says it can see the SDK. I can open the simulator from XC but inside VS no matter what Debug combination of the .iOS project I select all I get is "Generic Simulator". Any ideas?

Sprag

do you have the iOS project selected as the "startup project"? – Housebreaker

I do yes. It's got to be something with the project itself. I switched over to a solution from a different project and it would let me select the iOS Simulator as expected. – Sprag

Is the minimum supported version in Info.plist less than or equal to the version of iOS Simulator that you have? – Atkins

@Atkins +1 this was totally it! Thank you so much! Why can't I choose a comment as the accepted answer?!?! – Sprag

Glad that it helps – Atkins

I have got all simulators after Xcode successfully installed. – Icebound

Answer 1

Try Unload the IOS Project and Reload and Set as a Startup Project, it works for me

Vociferate

This happened to me after i installed Homebrew on my mac and i had to relocate the apple sdk in VS (I don't know why this happened). After reloading the project the simulators finally appeared again. – Kamenskuralski

I've had this happen multiple times now, but the unload/reload works. – Cruikshank

Answer 2

See the answer in the comment provided by @lowleetak:

Is the minimum supported version in Info.plist less than or equal to the version of iOS Simulator that you have?

This was the issue. The project settings listed 10.2 as the target SDK but the info.plist file had 10.3 which wasn't installed on the machine via Xcode. The machine has Xcode 8.2.1 and iOS 10.2 installed.

Additionally there's now a bug opened about this behavior. If the two fields are going to allow different values there should at least be a warning next to them about the mismatch.

Sprag

Answer 3

I also showed Generic Simulator only on my project after updating to XCode 14 early. At the release of XCode 14 the stable Visual Studio for Mac (Xamarin) release did not yet support this version of XCode. Even the preview channel was not yet ready. Guidance from Xamarin.iOS discussion group was that the special XCode14 channel could be used to evaluate. https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios/issues/15954

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