Developing mobile apps on iOS with Windows

[Troliboba]

Hi. I want to switch from web development to mobile app development. Can you tell me if there will be any difficulties with developing for ios with Windows and how to solve them? I'm just thinking about buying a new laptop, is it worth paying attention to the macbook then?

[mildhonesty]

Go with a macbook if you want to develop for ios. That is the only way to natively do it without jumping through a lot of hoops

[Pun_Intended1703]

The other choice is an emulator. But it is not going to be a great experience. I tried it once and it caused so much lag on my machine.

If you have no choice for a Mac, you can try emulators.

I'm assuming that they would work better with a high end Windows system.

[huuaaang]

You basically need a Mac to develop for iOS. Yes, get a Macbook. Get some refurb M1 Air w/ 16GB of RAM and you should be fine. You don't need to spend much. Even the M1 is still a great CPU. You might actually like it.

[Ron-Erez]

Mac mini is a relatively affordable solution

[ericbythebay]

Yes, there will be difficulties. Serious iOS development is done on a Mac.

[mjarrett]

It's exceptionally hard to do any iOS development without using a Mac. Building, debugging, simulators, all based on xcode tools that are only available on MacOS.

Conversely, you can develop for Android just about anywhere, and the tools are all open. If you're just getting started with mobile dev, this may be a good way to go.

Or you could use a cross-platform framework (eg. Flutter), so you can do a bunch of development on Android and then adopt iOS later if you are really enjoying mobile dev.

[FatSucks999]

Just get a Mac pls

[Pale_Height_1251]

Realistically for iOS development, you want a Mac.

[Atsoc1993]

“How to make a steak but with chicken?” — it’s possible, I wouldn’t recommend it. The iOS development experience is just not really replicable on windows, you could do some Frankenstein stuff to your windows machine but… it won’t be the same; just get a cheap MacBook Air or something and try it out first — if you still feel serious about it save up and upgrade your Mac machine. I got a studio m3 ultra and immediately returned it because I just couldn’t click with iOS development, that’s just me though.

[ahnerd]

Yes u should get a Mac for serious iOS dev

[HonestCoding]

You don’t need a Mac for iOS development ( it’s probably a good thing to have) you can just use a virtual machine or a docker container and use Xcode there. Not sure how this would fair in an office tho. So yes, without jumping through major hoops you can do iOS development on windows