| > Comparable to all curated store fronts. Nonsense. Android is a one time fee of $25. > Not different than supporting any commodity device. You should have target devices for every variation you intentionally support. Android has convenient cross platform emulators. Apple insists you give them tons of money every time they release a new iDevice :-) There is absolutely no reason to buy a physical device just to make sure your app renders correctly at some new resolution. > That's not true, both the macbook line but also in general. I have worked in places that use VM's on MacMinis for iOS development Please show me how to legally run MacOS in a VM on Linux while abiding by Apple's Terms of Service? I'm currently (unfortunately) running CI on a Mac Mini and it is the most fickle system I have ever used. Needs manual intervention pretty much every month. > but there's also AppCode from Jetbrains. How do I use this to build an ipa file and upload it to Apple, without running on an iDevice? > Mac Mini for CI, yes, if you're doing it as above then it's an additional VM on your MacMini. How to run on linux like literally everything else does? > That's not true, I use Linux to log in to my developer portal with the root account. That means you have an iPhone for receiving the 2FA push message. Good luck logging in without any iDevices. > They allow VMs and Emulators, they just require that it's official hardware. Completely useless. > If you are categorically opposed to owning any apple devices then I can see why you would feel a certain way. I'm opposed to being gouged by a bigcorp, while I'm providing value for them. Android manages just fine, all you need is a Windows/MacOS/Linux laptop with the emulator. Completely free until you want to publish, at which point it's a one time fee of $25 instead of a yearly fee of $100. I'm also opposed to needing a mac computer just to be allowed to publish for ios You also won't constantly get screwed over by "reviewers" who spend 2 minutes looking at your app before complaining about something their collegue said was ok previously. Need to push a critical bugfix? Not allowed unless you also fix these random unrelated "issues" that were fine the past 3 years! > yet I need to spend a lot of money because making Windows software on any other platform is practically impossible Cross compilation for windows is easier than it has ever been. It's not even possible for iDevices. > isn't going to help because you must still license that VM. Wrong again. Just use the free developer VMs: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt... > But ultimately every company that has a platform for software development is going to charge you: Apple is the only one gouging me left and right. The others are far, far more reasonable. |
I've worked in places that do dual platform development, and Android has always been the one that needs a ton of testing devices just to achieve a minimally-acceptable testing coverage (and we would still end up with more issues in the wild, than on iOS)
[EDIT] Maybe this is a solo dev versus team thing? Solo dev tests on their Pixel, pokes around in the emulator for other OS versions, looks fine, submits to Google, Google accepts. App has issues on a couple major Samsung phones (their goddamn OS customizations, OMG) and maybe a major Chinese brand or two, but the App Store accepted it, so that's that to the developer.
They try to do the same with Apple and a single phone and get it thrown back with "this is broken on other models of phone" and perceive that Apple's a harder/more-expensive target to test for.
Meanwhile, a team supporting multiple popular apps has developed a kind of scar-tissue that results in a 10-device Apple test drawer and an 80-device Android closet, resulting in the opposite perception.