[macOS] Deprecation of Xcode 16.4 on macOS 26 on December 8th.

[erik-bershel]

Breaking changes

Xcode 16.4 and its associated components and runtimes will be removed from a macOS 26 image.

Target date

Image deployment will start on Monday December 8th, 2025 and will take about 3 days.

The motivation for the changes

For a number of reasons, we plan to remove the tool from the image, including:

• Xcode 16.4 is not covered by the support policy and was a temporary tool used at the beginning of the image life cycle.
• Xcode 26, the main target tool for the image, has poor backward compatibility with Xcode 16 components.
• Xcode 16.4 is not a fully supported tool for macOS 26.
• We continue our efforts to save disk space.

Possible impact

If your macOS 26 based workflow or pipeline uses Xcode 16.4 or its runtime without prior configuration, it will stop working.

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 24.04
• Ubuntu Slim
• macOS 13
• macOS 13 Arm64
• macOS 14
• macOS 14 Arm64
• macOS 15
• macOS 15 Arm64
• macOS 26 Arm64
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022
• Windows Server 2025

Mitigation ways

If you see any issues with your workflows, you may do one of the next steps:

• For working with Xcode 16.4, we recommend using images based on macOS 15.
• If your builds use Xcode 26+ with older Xcode runtimes, you can install them on the fly using xcodebuild -downloadPlatform <iOS|watchOS|tvOS|visionOS> -buildVersion ${osversion}. See xcodebuild --help for details.