[kaanyalova]

Even 600$ is quite a bit of money for a small open source project, especially outside of first world contries. You cannot except every single open source developer to buy somewhat overpriced hardware just to publish it in one platform.

None of the other desktop/mobile platforms require specific hardware , Windows/Linux/Android can all be virtualized/cross compiled to. The only reason you cannot cross compile/virtualize from other platforms is because Apple doesn't want you to. Its possible, there are projects that allow you to do so, but it violates Apple's license.

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

Also its not fair to compare hobbies like photography or music to programming, you don't need any physical hardware other than a computer for majority of the cases, except testing (even that can be done somewhat reliably by virtualization), and when you are artificially forced to buy hardware just to publish to a platform.

[Aaargh20318]

> None of the other desktop/mobile platforms require specific hardware

But they still require hardware, and that hardware isn’t free either.

[eviks]

That hardware is something you use for other purposes, so it's free for the hobby. The challenge of specific hardware is that you can't use your non-specific one and have to pay

[lostmsu]

There are plenty of old laptops and PCs that you can get for free that are still supported.

You also can just virtualize other platforms.

[kaanyalova]

"Hardware" is cheap, easily accessible all around the world, Apple hardware is not.