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Comment by alex7o | Hacker News Reader

I don't use them on my real Mac why would I need them on my fake (VM) one

I think that means no iOS development so if you need that you need a real Mac

Note that the EU's Digital Markets Act will probably stop all that bs, as requiring to use one core platform service to develop for, and distribute to, another (iOS) is against that law.

Third-party app stores and outright website-based app distribution are coming next year anyway.

That's interesting, I did not know about this legislation. I'm not European, but it seems that even outside of Europe, people will benefit from this change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

If Apple was compelled to support a first-class iOS development experience on Windows, all this would do is immovably stunt the continued improvement of iOS development on macOS. There is a material degree of OS integration / cooperation in IOS development with Xcode. If Apple released a second-class development experience I’ve no doubt that you’d spare no time in making similar insinuations that it’s some sort of artificial constraint.

Xcode and iOS Simulator on other platforms would involve porting AppKit as well as writing all-new Darwin virtualization for those platforms. Xcode is thoroughly a Mac native app, and the iOS/watchOS/tvOS/etc simulators currently just run the respective userlands on top of the underpinnings that macOS shares with other Apple platforms.

It'd be rather similar to the situation with Docker, where Xcode and the simulators would run markedly better on macOS than on other platforms due to fewer layers being necessary. Developing for iOS on Windows or Linux would technically be possible but it wouldn't be very pleasant.

XCode is a hog, if there was a supported way to develop applications without it, that would be a first class experience.

This is more than accurate. I wanted to start iOS development, but even opening Xcode is painful.

Been using Xcode since 2012 and I think it's great. It has it's flaws, sure, but overall I think it's a really good development experience. What do you dislike about it?

I've been using it since it was known as Project Builder and also don't have many complaints. It's not perfect, but it's not bad. I spend plenty of time in the IntelliJ-based Android Studio and haven't found it to be much of an improvement (and in fact, find that its "smarts" get in the way as often as they help).

like the xcode cli tools. all th e basic tools are there.

Well, QEMU has no graphical acceleration for macOS (no virtio drivers for XNU and Quartz) so it's basically unusable - software rendering has been historically borked on macOS, and never well tested.

I can see why that would block publishing apps to the app store, but surely you can still locally develop applications in the iOS emulator?

I'm sure it's possible, depending on the kind of application and the tools you use to build it. But xcode won't build your application if you don't link your account. I believe it needs that to "sign" the application with apple.

There may be ways to get around this but I don't of any.

You can manage your signing identity entirely using Apple's website and just not use automatic provisioning. (I do that anyway even though I build on macOS as I just don't want our build system tied to Xcode just so we can use the automatic provisioning.)

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