Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by flax 394 days ago
Would this theoretically allow a Flutter app developer to build and deploy an ios app from Linux? God, I hope so.
4 comments

It technically violates the Apple Developer Agreement AFAIK, but that seems like yet another lawsuit waiting to happen IMO.
Apple won't do anything right now as they're certainly afraid the courts* will slap them hard.

*Both US and EU now

They’re still rejecting Fortnite so I don’t think they’re particularly scared of anything
Epic Games sure is proving to be a formidable opponent, but they might be getting a little optimistic with thinking that Fortnite will be allowed to return to the App Store; after all, while they have been squabbling over App Store policies, I don't think any of the rulings imply that Apple still can't keep specific titles banned from the App Store at their discretion. In that particular case I kinda feel like Apple might be right to not be afraid, at least not right now.

(P.S.: Personally, I initially thought Epic Games was stupid for flagrantly violating the ToS on purpose. Was that really needed to actually file the lawsuit? I dunno; I'm no expert. But it looked stupid. It looks a lot less stupid now, but it still kinda looks like a tactical mistake.)

Maybe they needn't be afraid here either, but from a risk perspective it does seem like causing a stink here may not be their best move. They're still going to aggressively try to railroad people into developing on Mac; there's no iPhone Simulator on Windows or Linux after all.

IMHO it's a matter of principle, showing the bully he has limited power no matter how big his muscles are.
In Epic's case it's just another bully who wants a piece of the first bully's turf.
People have been doing hackintoshes and macos VMs for years... And apple hasn't really done anything. So I doubt this tool will provoke them.
A long while ago, they put some company selling hackintoshes straight into the ground. Nobody tried since
Apple has killed the Hackintosh…. It’s just bleeding out still.
How so? Seems like Hackintosh got kind of obsolete with Apple Silicon.
You can't install XCode on non-Apple devices. Or use iMessage.
Is this the case? How does that work? Genuinely curious. I remember I had macOS (Mac OS X, actually) on my PC. My last Hackintosh was Mac OS X Leopard. Everything seemed to work well... back then. I even had XCode working.
you can still install xcode - and also still use imessage if you configure your vm correctly, see kholia/OSX-KVM
iMessage can be made to work with a hackintosh. You just have to go the whole way in making your hackintosh fully Mac-like with a fake but plausible/realistic serial number and expected network setup. You can’t stop at just getting macOS installed and booting.

I’ve had multiple installs in the past where it worked fine.

Yeah weird world. When Gates bundles IE that no one wants it's an abuse of power but when Jobs shoves his apples down your throat just to (try to) publish for their platform it's all OK.. Oh, or was that the lawsuit waiting to happen? ;)
Same thing with the bank bail out, if Bush did oh my we will never hear end of it, but if cool president who smokes weed and get down some good music, then no one really call him out on it.
I believe it allows usage on “Apple-branded computers”, so building iOS apps with xtool on Asahi is probably legit.

But yeah, I would probably use this for testing only, and do actual releases from macOS proper.

IIRC it is only a potential issue if the host machine isn't made by Apple. You can install Linux on a Mac and use this.

IANAL yada yada.

Does it? You still need to install Xcode for the iOS SDK, so they're not really doing anything wrong?
This project helps but isn’t enough alone:

1. Dart can’t cross-compile from Linux to iOS yet. You could use Dart’s interpreter instead, but that’d significantly regress performance.

2. Flutter iOS projects use the Xcode project format, you’d need to migrate that to xtool’s project format

3. Flutter hasn’t finished migrating its plugin ecosystem from CocoaPods to SwiftPM - any plugin that hasn’t migrated to SwiftPM yet likely won’t work with xtool.

Afaik its already possible with darling. Nixpkgs also has xcbuild replacement, but not sure if it can handle codesigning.
Just use something like CodeMagic, I wouldn't risk getting your Apple account banned.