[kodablah]

This is a welcome sign for those that do not want to buy Apple hardware and have struggled working with Hackintosh VMs or cloud-based OSX desktops.

Is it still policy for Apple to require XCode and therefore force you into buying Apple hardware (one way or another) in order to deploy to the App Store?

[RussianCow]

Yes. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, you can't deploy an app to the app store without a Mac. But you can (at least in theory) do iOS development on a Windows machine.

[davnicwil]

Isn't it that you just need your build to be signed by a registered copy of XCode/OSX (don't know specifically what it is)?

So you can actually just send the code developed on your windows box off to a third party build server, which will be an actual registered mac - you get the compiled binary back and then submit that to the app store, no worries.

I'm not sure if the rules around this have changed but IIRC from a couple of years ago when I last checked, this is what Adobe were doing with their phonegap build server - you send them up your phonegap project which can be written on anything (windows, linux, etc), they compile it to apps for various platforms and send you back those binaries, you then just submit these to the various platform app stores. Again, IIRC, this included iOS apps.

[RussianCow]

You are correct, and if I remember clearly, I think this is how Xamarin does it as well.

[WorldWideWayne]

There's always Cordova/PhoneGap and possibly Ionic Framework. It's much easier to build apps that look good on all different device sizes with hybrid tech. You'll want to use Visual Studio 2015 for that too since Microsoft now has an Android Emulator which is faster than any other.

Looking to the future, there's React Native.

[s73v3r]

If you don't want to buy Apple hardware, why are you bothering with iOS?