[tombert]

You actually can side load on your own phone for free with Xcode. I did this about a year ago when I wrote a sound board with Mario sound effects for a board game we were playing. I didn’t buy a developer license to do so, and my phone wasn’t jailbroken.

[aspenmayer]

I’m assuming you signed with your own developer certificate and resigned every 7 days?

Last time I did this I was using Cydia Impactor but it’s been a while. I had an automatic local resigning tool on my device that required jailbreak but I think you can also do this with AltStore/AltServer iirc without jailbreak or just do it manually with Xcode.

To your original point upthread, you can run Xcode on a macOS virtual machine if you don’t have a real Apple desktop or laptop.

[tombert]

Yes, that is what I did. It was annoying that I had to keep renewing it, but it wasn’t terribly difficult for nearly anyone who frequents HN.

I haven’t ever had success with getting macOS running in a virtual machine but I admittedly haven’t tried in awhile and didn’t spend a ton of time on it.