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Comment by flax | Hacker News Reader

Apple has its own unnecessary hurdles. Mostly around requiring xcode, which requires a mac.

But yeah, both stores need to be forcefully opened. They're sitting on their laurels inside their moats.

The XCode requirement makes some sense because it would take Apple a lot of extra work to port and support their tools on other platforms. Work that they have no incentive to do.

But I think the native app market in general has peaked. Most things can be done in a web app now.

Distribution and retention still vastly better on the app stores. Haven’t seen a successful web app match polish on mobile either - react native etc. do though but only when distributed as a native bundle.

Maybe but still the overwhelming majority of app store apps never find an audience or make any real revenue. And polish only matters for certain kinds of apps and even then only after you've identified a real market. Targeting both mobile platforms + all desktops is so much easier on the web.

I'm more hopeful about Apple porting a proper version of Xcode to the iPadOS, and I'm not particularly hopeful about that either.

The underlying assumption is that Apple is expected to port XCode to some other platform, rather than just using a third party tool on that platform like gcc or VSCode to make iOS apps.

Publish a spec and people who want to will make their own tools.

As someone who had to get a MacBook and an iPhone just to develop a mobile app for their ecosystem, it did leave a bit of a sour taste in my mouth and I wish that weren't the case! Surely there could be an open source cross platform IDE and emulator, like Android Studio, which would get me most of the way there regardless of the platform.

Kind of wish they'd partner with JetBrains and we'd get Apple Studio or something.

There was a time: https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

I'm not sure about a lot. There are tools available that let you just extract some files from Xcode and build on Windows. These work a treat and are maintained by a single guy.

Xcode not being required doesn't mean Apple is required to provide alternatives. There are some alternative, compatible signing tools already out there for example. They'd just need to stop being control freaks for a little bit.

I've just been using the MacOS runner in Github Actions. Still requires the $99/year fee but not the $2000 laptop.

Do you have an example of this workflow? Are you developing outside of XCode on a non-macOS platform in Swift and then essentially compiling and packaging using GitHub Actions?

I actually use codemagic.io which is free at my usage level. And amazing. Codemagic has repeatedly provided painless tools to work around Apple's artificial pain points.

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