[kintamanimatt]

I'm a Linux and Android user. My Android phone wasn't any cheaper than an iPhone and I can most certainly afford any Apple hardware I want. I also don't use Linux because I'm cheap, I use Linux because I love it. The hardware was exactly what I wanted too.

I don't develop for iOS because I don't want to own a Mac. I (as a long-time Linux user) find OS X incredibly frustrating.

There's also absolutely no reason to force developers to use a particular brand of hardware or a particular operating system to develop for a particular phone.

[msie]

There's also absolutely no reason to force developers to use a particular brand of hardware or a particular operating system to develop for a particular phone.

Well, it costs money for Apple to support development on Windows and Linux platforms. Who's going to port Xcode and the simulator to run on those platforms? How many different types of Windows and Linux configurations are out there?

[shitlord]

> Well, it costs money for Apple to support development on Windows and Linux platforms

The cost of doing that pales in comparison to what they are making off of iOS. If they can afford to keep developing iTunes for Windows, they can afford to port their other software. For some reason, I don't think Apple will go out of business if they give it a shot.

> How many different types of Windows and Linux configurations are out there?

So target the most prevalent ones. I don't know about all of the various configurations on linux, but it's really not so bad with Windows - just target Windows 7 or higher, and you should be good. Nobody is saying it needs to look nice or even look like a native program; we just want something we can work with, even if it looks like dog shit.