[macOS] Default Xcode on macOS 13 Ventura will be set to Xcode 15.2 on July, 15

[erik-bershel]

Breaking changes

Default Xcode will be changed to 15.2 on macOS 13 Ventura

Target date

The propagation will start on July, 15 and take 2-3 days

The motivation for the changes

New minor Xcode releases for this version are no longer expected; the most popular among users is the latest available version of the IDE. We would like to provide images with the latest stable updates as default ones and removed old patch version as per our guidelines.

Possible impact

If you use the default Xcode version and your project is not compatible with Xcode 15.2 your build can be broken.

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 24.04
• macOS 11
• macOS 12
• macOS 13
• macOS 13 Arm64
• macOS 14
• macOS 14 Arm64
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022

Mitigation ways

Please consider switching Xcode in runtime to the version that you need to build an app.
The following snippet can be used to switch Xcode:

sudo xcode-select -s "/Applications/Xcode_15.0.1.app"

The list of all available Xcode versions can be found in the image documentation

[deepak1556]

Hi, not sure if this was already notified but Xcode 15.0.1 contains a linker bug that affects C++ projects https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-notes/xcode-15_1-release-notes#Linking at runtime on macOS <= 12. This caught us by surprise, refs microsoft/vscode#219893 (comment). We are now forcing the agents to use >= 15.1 that contains the fix.

[sarathrajsrinivasan]

Image rollout completed. 15.2 is now the default Xcode on macOS 13.