[dvduval]

What continues to bother me is just that developers who don’t have the budget are pretty much pushed out of iOS development because they can’t afford a Mac. And every time that Apple increases the price of their products, more people are blocked from being able to develop on them.

[eschaton]

It’s not really that onerous for a platform to require that, to develop for it, you need to actually take part in it. For Apple platforms that means becoming a Mac user. For IBM i and z that also means getting substantial hardware or paying for accounts and licenses (once you want to go beyond learning).

You can develop for Linux and BSD and Haiku and all sorts of other platforms for free. If the cost is what matters to you, then just do that. If you’re doing it as a business, though, consider that you’re extremely lucky to be able to just buy a low-end device and a low-end system and that’s all the capital investment needed (plus the US$100/year membership as recurring opex).

[geraneum]

People not having access to tech is bothersome, but nowadays Apple offers affordable machines compared to the same/worse specs from competitors. For example a MacBook Air with Apple Silicon and a moderate amount of memory.

[MindSpunk]

Why should you need a Mac to build for iOS at all? What makes Apple so special here? Cross-compilation toolchains aren't forbidden alien technology.

Forcing people onto Macs is such a pathetic way of extracting rent from developers and makes workflows worse. No you can't just build and debug your app from your Windows or Linux workstation because we want you to buy hardware you don't need. Sorry we only support Xcode on the latest version of MacOS, how else will your build machine roll out of the OS support window and make you replace a functioning machine?

It's especially nice when you work on projects that aren't iOS/Apple native and you don't get Mac workstations. You end up with this wonderful mess of shared machines and half assed tools because you just need the bare minimum to push a build to a phone.

[geraneum]

I don't disagree with you, but we're talking about affordability which is a different topic.

> It's especially nice when you work on projects that aren't iOS/Apple native and you don't get Mac workstations.

If you develop natively for macOS, then you probably need the OS for it. It's the same for Linux and Windows. But building is not the biggest hurdle because you can build in your usage-based-billed/free CI as well the same way you do for other platforms.

For complete native development (system APIs, OS interactions, native UI) against macOS/iOS on PC, Apple needs to open those OSes for PCs/Pixels/Samsungs/etc. This is a software issue, not hardware. Otherwise Apple silicon Macs are less restrictive than PC hardware in general!

[MindSpunk]

I'm not really sure how any machine is more affordable than the $0 it should cost because you shouldn't need a Mac. It's absolutely true that you can get by with a base spec Mac Mini, but often you can't with bigger projects and the cost skyrockets because Apple prices memory like kidneys (current market conditions aside, they've always done it).

I have nothing against the hardware. I despise how artificial the problem is. It's not even like Apple just refuse to provide tools and leave it up to the community. They force you to use a Mac in the terms of service.

For context I work on the mobile team for a large AAA game engine. This is going to colour my opinion because we're very Windows centric, but my experience wouldn't exist if it weren't for Apple. I need to sync code on two different machines and build half the project on Windows and the other half on the Mac. If we could just build and debug the iPhone on Windows none of this mess would be needed.

We don't develop for MacOS, we develop for iOS. Just debugging the app requires several hoops across multiple machines because of Apple's policy here. Just because a base spec Mac Mini is cheap doesn't make this whole problem any less stupid. I don't need a vendor's special-sauce computer to build for consoles. Cross compilation and remote debugging has existed for decades, this problem should not exist.

Calling it more affordable because Mac Minis aren't junk anymore is really just accepting Apple's ridiculous requirement because "I guess it could be worse right?".

[geraneum]

> I don't need a vendor's special-sauce computer to build for consoles.

This is ironic. Of course you do. You're already using it. You just happen to like the Microsoft's walled garden and not Apples. That's fine, but let's not pretend that "Windows centric" is anything but another monopolistic and exclusionary ecosystem. If you want to use Nvidia drivers, or develop against DirectX, can you do it on a macOS? I get the criticism of Apple's walled garden and I'm against it too, but not from your position.

[eschaton]

Because it would cost Apple a substantial amount of money to make it possible to build your code for iOS on other platforms in any sort of supported fashion. So all the stuff they invest very substantial amounts of money into creating and maintaining are only going to be licensed for use on the hardware they sell under the latest operating system it runs. Asking for more is asking them to spend more money without any evidence of a commensurate return.

If you can produce a properly structured submission to the App Store ingestion pipeline without using a Mac, then I doubt Apple will care. But that doesn’t mean they’re obligated to help you, and especially not to spend millions of dollars to do so.

[MindSpunk]

The Apple developer terms of service require all app submissions to come from a Mac.

Apple could've chosen to offer no tools and leave it to the community to build their own. I think that's reasonable. I don't expect Microsoft to bring MSVC to Linux.

But Apple take the explicit position that you must purchase a Mac in order to ship apps for iOS.

[eschaton]

Oh no. The horror. How terrible.