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floomk

Let me know when I can use those to develop an iOS app from Windows or Linux

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iOS is a supported target in Visual Studio Professional on Windows.

It requires you have a macOS machine somewhere on your network to use Xcode to do the actual build.

Mostly true, but you can do a lot of direct development work now with .NET hot restart:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/ios/hot-restar...

This sounds mostly useless.

I believe Zig is capable of this in a primitive way, and they got there by piggy-backing on LLVM development that Apple has contributed to.

There's absolutely nothing Apple is doing to prevent you from developing on iOS from Windows or Linux. Much of the open source development they're doing is making it easier in theory. But in practice, there's just not enough people willing and interesting in putting in the work to set it up. Most iOS developers would just rather use the official tools. And why should Apple put in lots of extra work just to let people develop from other platforms? That's just never going to happen.

Where do you get the idea that most iOS devs prefer Apple? It's not true for any other type of development so are you arguing that Apple fans self sort to iOS devs?

I would love to use Linux build machines but the xcode requirements make it a non-starter...and its not for lack of effort.

some people ascribe hostility when instead they should infer indifference. if you have an activist mind, you over index on confirmation bias.

I don't know, considering that the only reason you can't compile an application targetting MacOS from your Linux CI/CD is a license that disallows the use of certain MacOS libraries from being used outside of MacOS - combined with Apple's history of aggressively ring-fencing their users, it's understandable that engineers would feel that it's deliberate.

If you copy those libraries illegally to Linux, you can build for MacOS from Linux - so either Apple feels indifferent towards engineers building for MacOS or they want everyone to buy a Mac and compile release software locally.

What worse is Apple doesn't provide any server-specific hardware/software for automation - so it really does feel like Apple expects people to build release software on MacBook Pros or something.

> a license that disallows the use of certain MacOS libraries from being used outside of MacOS

It doesn’t make a big difference in practice, but is there such a clause in their license? I thought the limitation was on Apple hardware.

If so, you can build on Linux running on a Mac mini, for example.

I believe it's a) on Mac hardware and b) on MacOS (or a VM running on top of MacOS - can be any OS if virtualized)

The same terms cover usage of things like Rosetta 2, which cannot be used on Asahi Linux despite Linux running on Mac hardware.

Everyone should have an activist mindset.

Build servers are a thing, and using a mac as a build node is hilariously complicated and unstable when compared to linux. When my developers push to git the android app is built & tested & uploaded to the store automatically. We also have this working for iOS but it requires a mac in a closet that needs manual maintenance every month or so when apple breaks something again. The linux servers are generally hands-off. Also, android builds are about 10x faster because they run on a machine with 128gb ram and a big cpu which isn't even possible with a mac (and even if it was, I'm sure apple would charge an insane amount for it).

where can i find a distribution of xcodebuild for linux or windows?

You can do this with a fair amount of effort. I believe licensing prevents you from shipping those apps directly, though.

AFAIK building iOS apps on Linux is possible if you try really hard, but deploying isn't.

You can setup a CI build process on some CI provider that have MacOS servers as hosts.

That is, you still have to pay for Apple hardware, but by renting it, not owning.

If you write it in Swift or Objective-C, you're using LLVM and clang.

But you’re still not building it on Windows or Linux.

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