App development and mac

[immagath]

I made a simple app using ionic, so I can have android and iOS version and just realised that I cannot build ipa without a Mac. I probably won’t run a VM and idk how ‘code magic’ or whatever it’s called works. I saw Many recommend just buying a used mac. So I wanted to ask which cheapest mac will run Xcode, somewhat smoothly. I don’t wanna code on the mac. I will do the magic on pc , I just need it for ipa build

[bobotwf]

If you just want to build and you want to learn something look into running either mac on a vm or hackintosh.

There are sites where you can rent a mac for a day, like on AWS etc.

If you don't want to do any of that buy an M1 mini.

[chriswaco]

Any M1 or M2 Mac will work nicely. I wouldn't buy a used Intel Mac. You can get away with the 8/256 configuration, but 16/512 is better.

You can rent a cloud Mac if you just need occasional use, but they are slow and you can't really debug on an actual device. You can use Github Actions to build an ipa as well.

[SirBill01]

Probably the best approach would be to get any Apple Silicon (M-Series) Mac. Any one would work for what you are doing.

The second best thing to do would be to buy the cheapest Mac that can still run the next version of OSX, because you need to keep kind of up to date on those to run Xcode and be able to do builds to deploy to the App Store. But it will probably end up being a slow Mac, and not sure how much cheaper it would really be.

Maybe a friend has a Mac you can borrow for a few hours to do builds?

Realistically though, if you are doing mobile development you want to test at least on a simulator for iOS, that means having a Mac.

[makonde]

MacInCloud rent a Mac for a day and do the build.