Now Playing: iOS 9, Up Next: tvOS

Yesterday was a big day for Apple announcements. Beyond new iPhones and bigger iPads, the big news for many developers was the new Apple TV that will be joining the lineup of devices with an SDK and an App Store, and the new 3D Touch APIs for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus introduced in the iOS 9 SDK GM release.

Apple TV and tvOS

The new Apple TV runs tvOS, which allows you to build and publish native apps for the big screen. In the keynote presentation, several amazing Apple TV apps were demonstrated that highlight the new capabilities that will be at developers fingertips in the new SDK. We were excited to see the best-selling Xamarin-based game Transistor from Supergiant Games featured, reimagined for Apple TV.

The best part for developers is that Apple’s tvOS is just a specialized version of iOS that removes some APIs while adding TV-specific ones. That means that not only will you be able to use Xamarin to build for it, but you’ll find that you can expect the same platform code sharing strategies are still relevant. With Universal Apps, you’ll also be able to run the same code on both iPad and Apple TV with UI modifications.

Apple published a new Xcode 7.1/iOS 9.1 beta yesterday to support tvOS development. We’re hard at work on our support for this and we expect to publish an iOS 9.1 preview that includes tvOS very soon!

Xamarin.iOS Beta for iOS 9 and Xcode 7 Support

The new iOS 9 SDK requires Xcode 7 to be installed and Apple has posted new Xcode 7 and iOS 9 “GM Seed” releases to support this release. We have published Xamarin.iOS support for iOS 9 in our beta update channel for both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio. This includes the cool new 3D Touch, and other APIs.

Installing Xamarin.iOS for iOS 9

To get full iOS 9 support:

• Download and install the Xcode 7 GM Seed from Apple’s Developer Center.
• Install it to the default location.
• Switch the Xamarin Studio Updater channel to the “Beta” channel.
• Install the Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin Studio updates.

Additionally, we’ll be publishing Visual Studio extension updates for iOS 9 to our beta channel within the next 24 hours.

Learning iOS 9

iOS 9 is a fantastic new release with a lot of exciting new features, and we’ve just pushed updates to our documentation website covering most of them, including the 3D Touch APIs introduced yesterday. A great place to get started with iOS 9 is our Introduction to iOS 9 guide and samples. You can also check the API Change Log for a complete list of API differences. And don’t forget the Release Blog for up-to-date information on known issues and other release notes.