Developing for iOS

After you install Xcode, Qt Creator automatically detects the toolchain and creates the necessary kits to build applications for and run them on configured iOS devices.

You only need Qt libraries that are built for iOS. You can install Qt for iOS with Qt Online Installer.

iOS 17 Devices

Qt Creator detects iOS devices, and you can deploy and run applications on them.

For iOS devices with iOS 16 or earlier, Qt Creator also supports accessing the application output, debugging, and profiling. However, these features are not supported for physical devices with iOS 17 or later because of limitations of the Apple tool for accessing these devices.

Specifying Supported iOS Versions

You can build applications for the latest iOS version and deploy them to previous versions. For the most part, this works automatically. However, you must take care when you manually set your own target version. If you set it to a value higher than what Qt requires and supply your own Info.plist file, you must add an LSMinimumSystemVersion entry to the Info.plist that matches the value of CMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET (when using CMake), QMAKE_IOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET (when using qmake), or cpp.minimumIosVersion (when using Qbs) because iOS (and the App Store) will use the LSMinimumSystemVersion value as the authoritative one.

If you specify a deployment target value lower than what Qt requires, your application will almost certainly crash somewhere in the Qt libraries when run on an older version than Qt supports. Therefore, make sure that the actual build system code reflects the minimum iOS version that is actually required.