[cavisne]

They mentioned the main use case when they launched the initial Mac ec2 instances.

Any company that does something on iOS/macos needs mac hardware to run builds on, there is no other (legal) option. The status quo (even at very large companies) is some mac mini's under someones desk/in a closet somewhere.

This is basically replacing the cost of that setup (ie the oncall for it/hassle). The AWS service is even more expensive than things like MacStadium because you also get AWS network connectivity and other features.

[rsync]

Is this really true?

There really isn’t a cross compiling chain that would allow me to build a macOS app on a freebsd system (for instance) ?

[bogwog]

I've manually done it before (on Linux). Technologically it's not that hard to do, but legally is where it becomes a problem. IIRC the Xcode license (which applies to the iOS SDKs) requires you to use them on Apple branded computers.

I don't know why Apple cares so much about that, especially since they're already collecting their yearly $100 tax from developers on top of the 30% revenue cut. I guess at their size, extracting every last penny is how you get to a trillion dollar valuation?

So unless you have a strong legal defense ready, you should probably just pay Apple.

EDIT: I should clarify that by "it's not that hard to do", I mean that it's easy because someone else already did the hard part :)

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/cctools-port

[david_allison]

Cross-compiling is possible, but breaks the Xcode/Apple SDK license terms.

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross#packaging-the-sdk

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/xcode.pdf

[pbalau]

No. If you want to build things for the Apple ecosystem, you need to use the Apple ecosystem.