Build an iOS app on Linux or Windows

Never built on Apple, last time I tried:

it asked me to update Xcode;

Xcode asked me to update the OS first;

and the OS asked me to buy a new 1300$€ MacBook hardware (with similar specs, the one I was using wasn't even that old/slow).

So to quote Rick and Morty i though: "That's just subscription with extra steps!" - and made a windows program and an Android app.

Exactly. Apparently Apple still finds enough idiots who perform that dance, but they've lost me. I can only hope others will follow and xtool looks like it can help.

I hope you also have a good internet connection because even in 2025, MacOS is incapable of resuming downloads.

Do you call anyone who isn't of your opinion an idiot?

Don't worry, those "idiots" are doing perfectly fine with great salaries and a nice developer experience who apparently figured out using archaic hardware for developing newer devices is practically pointless even if there were software support.

I daily every os for 2-3 years and then switch. There are lots of benefits to OSX. Stability, perfect Standby and battery runtime to name a few. This would not be possible if they would support older Hardware. As long as windows and linux is unable to archive similar metrics, they prove apples point about this topic. Just look how fast everybody transitions to M Processors including the software developers. There is no point to stay on old hardware with apple.

What are you talking about?

Most of us get compensated to do it and the hardware either paid for or tax deductible. Whatever positions you take as a developer, there is strong end-user demand for software on iOS and to a certain extent macOS so there will continue to be people who'll do that dance.

I wouldn't call XCode a nice developer experience. Hell comes closer

Yes, I gave up on Apple too after my Intel Celeron box could not be used

That is not MacOS you are using?

Stockholm syndrome

I've developed a lot of iOS apps for over a decade and have yet to see any semblance of the "nice developer experience" you're mentioning.

Good salary for sure but as for the developer experience, the iOS tooling is one of the worst you can have in the modern era. I'd even pick the nodejs anarchy over xcode and that says a lot.

I had to redownload 4 times xcode from the Mac App Store because any problem when downloading breaks it.

I think it's the last modern OS which can't resume downloads.

That is not an OS issue but an issue with the App Store. Also this is not true. I just tried it: https://youtu.be/Z6v1adrsqQM

I guess you have some kind of issue with your clock or io issues which corrupts the package. Are you using a vm?

There are great salaries in all spectrums of technology.

As for calling XCode a "nice developer experience", I can only attribute to stockholm syndrome, lack of experience with better tools or both.

No I was on real hardware, resuming with the button works but I guess it was cut in the middle by a wifi issue and in this case it just errors out.

I'd argue it's not about my opinion. What my parent comment describes is a recognizable pattern that Apple has been pulling for over a decade now. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me ad nauseam again and again — well...

I don't use Xcode anymore in practice (Vscode+React Native here) yet back in the ObjC+storyboard days I loved storyboard and general expressiveness of Objective-C.

Sure it had quirks (codesigning issues, weird errors from underlying C-level calls, ObjC "primitives" bot playing nicely with C primitives without boxing etc.) but I generally loved the experience especially around WYSIWYG of storyboards.

It's a matter of taste then. As a fullstack dev I still end up loving how Xcode cleanly represents things visually even though I'm not using it much other than building step anymore.

I already could jump to other stuff if I didn't like it, the reason I kept using it because I simply liked the experience, at least to my personal taste of seeing things.

If you think having a different personal taste is "stockholm syndrome" I don't have much else to say though.

Perhaps it doesn't crash for you but...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> back in the ObjC+storyboard days

That must have been on very, very archaic hardware, by your own words.

Until you got to code review a coworker's storyboard. The underlying XML was absolutely horrible to deal with.

Simply opening a storyboard without editing anything would also trigger file changes. I'm glad storyboards are gone.