iOS Simulator panel shows black screen after host reboot, doesn't recover even after underlying simulator is healthy again
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Workaround ✓ Mentioned in description ↑
Activity 0 comments · opened Jul 28, 2026
Description
After a macOS reboot, the Claude Code iOS Simulator panel (mcp__Claude_Code_iOS_Simulator__control, attach/screenshot/tap actions) showed a persistent black screen in the live panel, even after the underlying simulator was confirmed healthy.
Repro steps
- Reboot the host Mac (Xcode 26.5, iOS 26.5 simulator runtime).
- Boot an iOS Simulator device via
xcrun simctl boot. - Call
attachon the Claude Code iOS Simulator panel — panel opens but renders black / partially gray. screenshotaction fails:Error Domain=com.facebook.FBSimulatorControl Code=0 "No Image available to encode"— confirms the frame source itself was dead post-reboot, not just the panel's stream.- Fix underlying frame source:
simctl shutdown, killCoreSimulatorService, relaunch viaopen -a Simulator --args -CurrentDeviceUDID <udid>. After this,screenshotsucceeds and shows correct content (home screen), andtapregisters. - Despite the frame source now being provably healthy, the panel continues to show black to the user.
detach+attachdoes not fix it. - At one point during this, the panel backend itself crashed and auto-restarted ("Claude Code iOS Simulator is restarting after a crash").
- Workaround: bypass the panel entirely —
open -a Simulator --args -CurrentDeviceUDID <udid>opens the real macOS Simulator.app window directly, which renders correctly.
Expected
The panel should either recover automatically once the underlying simulator surface is healthy again, or detach/attach should force a full stream renegotiation rather than reusing a stale encoder session.
Environment
- macOS (Darwin 25.5.0), Xcode 26.5, iOS 26.5 simulator runtime
- Claude Code CLI