Xamarin.forms iOS simulator not launching

Question

I have connected my windows laptop to Macbook pro late 2011 for developing xamarin.forms ios applications. My visual studio version on Widows machine is 16.7.2 with xamarin.ios version 13.20.2.2. My xamarin.ios version on Macbook is 13.14.1.39 and Xcode version is 11.3.1(11C504). The problem I am facing is I cannot run ios simulator on both windows and mac. I can manually open simulator on Mac. But when we run application against simulator it will build successful , but no simulator shows up. The simulator drop downs on both visual studio and Xcode shows plenty of simulators with ios 13.3. What should be the problem? I have checked and unchecked "Remote simulator to windows" and no change. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I had an exact same problem. In my case, it helped to:

1. In Visual Studio, right click on iOS project -> Properties -> iOS Bundle Signing
2. For Debug | iPhoneSimulator configuration, change Bundle Signing scheme to the "Automatic Provisioning"
3. Click Save All button in Visual Studio
4. Right click on iOS project and select "Unload project"
5. Select unloaded iOS project to see *.csproj file contents
6. In <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|iPhoneSimulator' "> Remove tags <CodesignKey> and <CodesignProvision>
7. Click Save all button
8. Right click on iOS project -> Reload Project

Now it should be working.

Answer 2

In my company guys working on Xamarin have the same issue. I can safely say it's not a problem with your old version of MacOS neither of Xcode. We've got old iMac, which first showed the same problem, so today I brought my private MacBook, all legitimately updated to latest versions of software, but with no luck, same problem.

The solution we've got right now so you can continue development is to uninstall your current version of VS and install previous one, most likely 16.6. This worked for one of teammates, tomorrow we will try fresh install of 16.7, maybe it's issue with VS update system.

Here is link to official MS thing on how to install previous version of VS: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2019/history#installing-an-earlier-release

I hope this works, I am not 100% sure if that's what my friend was using.