[jessemillar]

While I understand your point, I would gently argue that to develop a truly great macOS or iOS app, you somewhat need to live in the Apple ecosystem to understand the design guidelines and quality that Apple customers have come to expect.

[asdff]

I bet the most downloaded apps these days are ground up cross platform and identical on every platform, e.g. steam, spotify, and web browsers. Relying on proprietary apple features that you have to clumsily port over to another OS would waste a lot of your time as a dev. You'd probably do your best troubleshooting on a cheap, under powered hackintosh than a model year macbook pro, to be honest.

[jessemillar]

Fair point. I tend to not like those cross-platform apps because of their generally-degraded performance so my previous comment showed a bit of my underlying bias.

[virtualritz]

Yes. But parent didn't contest that. They rather made the point that you have to pay to "live" in that ecosystem. MacOS is officially only supported on Apple hardware ... So it's not free and the fact that XCode is is therefore a moot point to that line of reasoning.