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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

> Advanced users are welcome to build iSH themselves—it’s free and open source and always will be!

I mean, the app store fiasco sucks, but at the same time if you're advanced enough to want a command line on an iDevice you're probably advanced enough to do 'git clone', hit the build button in XCode, and do a local install. It's grade school level of difficulty.

Ideally they'd offer a release that you can build and install locally that's full featured and is wholly unfettered by concerns about app store policies.

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Whether you are advanced or not to do that doesn't matter.

I am advanced enough to sideload applications via XCode. I have done so. I stopped doing it, because reinstalling every 7 days is an annoyance that no app was worth. I switched to Android instead.

As another comment notes, this also does not cover people who have an iOS device but no Mac. Which is definitely an overwhelming majority of iOS owners in general (just looking at iOS vs Mac hardware sales), though I don't know about power users. I could see people who consider themselves iOS power users to also likely have a Mac, but at the same time I could also see them as wanting to use the Mac as little as possible.

I’m actually not sure about that, as far as I can tell there’s no way for me to build the app without having access to another Apple machine running the full MacOS. I just have an iPad and a Linux desktop, which generally suits me fine.

So, the App Store fiasco sucks, and doubly so for those who are not already entirely inside Apple’s walled garden.

Last I checked it was possible to run Mac OS in a VM on linux and install via USB tether. This isn't quite the grade school level of difficulty, but if you're using linux as your daily driver you're already accustomed to doing things the hardest way.

I’ll have to check that out. The feasibility would depend on whether I have to buy a Mac OS license just to do this.

Haha, you can't just buy a macos license. You also are not allowed to use it on non-apple hardware iirc.

IIUC this isn't legal as the macOS license doesn't allow running it on non-Apple hardware. (unless your Linux box is a Mac of course)

Driving over the speed limit and jaywalking aren't legal either ;)

I found a project for running MacOS in a VM on Linux. It is called "sosumi". A great double Apple reference.

It's not legal, unless you own a license that only comes bundled with the Apple hardware and can't be bought separately

FWIW, iSH has prebuilt binaries: https://github.com/ish-app/ish/releases

It’s kind of annoying unless you’re paying money to join the development program.

You don't need a developer account to do local installs, and haven't for a long time.

It’s annoying because you need to constantly resign.

You need Apple hardware to build apps

That's not for granted

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