I was thinking about common developer complaints about XCode today when doing a little Android work. I grabbed the latest code to one of our Android projects today, opened it in Eclipse, and tried to build it. It failed with the following reason:

Android requires .class compatibility set to 5.0. Please fix project properties.

If you open the project properties and dig through every pane, sub-pane, and sub-sub pane, you’ll never find an option for “.class compatibility.”

Obtuse error messages? Inadequate instructions? Just like XCode!

But to be fair, XCode has gotten tremendously better in recent releases. Error messages are greatly improved. Common errors are found and fixed for you. The current release will even automatically connect to the Provisioning Portal and manage devices and profiles for you. Without a doubt the biggest impediment to developers learning the iOS platform is dealing with certificates and profiles, and XCode just made it automatic. Nowadays most complaints about XCode are really just veiled complaints about gdb, objective-c syntax, or Macs in general.

Anyway, back to Android. What’s the fix? Don’t actually try to fix the project properties yourself. Right-click on the project name in the project explorer and, in that stupidly long menu, go to the 28th item (seriously, I counted them, it’s 28 not counting the separators) called “Android Tools,” and in the submenu, go to the last item called, appropriately enough, “Fix Project Properties.”

I love driving jeeps. I love the wind stinging my eyes and bugs getting stuck in my hair. But even I have limits. Hey, Android Development Tools: would it kill you to maybe execute that yourself if you see that it needs to be done?

And you start the pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth and try everything you can think of? But cleaning and rebuilding does nothing to help. Reboot of the device does nothing. Even that most tempting all Mac voodoo, the Needless Reboot of the Mac, does nothing to help.

Fear not, I’ve got the answer. And the simple answer is, you had a provisioning profile on the device expire. Yes, I know the profile for this particular app didn’t fail. Even if the expired provisioning profile has nothing to do with this app, has never been used for this app, has no device ID similarities with this app, your app won’t launch on the device.

Until you delete the expired provisioning profile, that is. Go to the “Organizer” window in XCode, click on the device, and delete the profile. Go to the profile list, and delete the profile there. Once you delete the profile, everything works again, as if magic.