Comment on How are the blatant anti-competitive practices of Apple just…allowed? How is this even possible?
scheep@lemmy.world 5 days agoI’m just interested to know how they’re able to make it so that you HAVE to use XCode (which is only available on MacOS)
You don’t really; a cross compilation with a compiler that can generate the ARM instructions for Apple’s ARM CPUs should largely just work.
However, it’s impossible to test the produced app without using an iPhone or MacOS’s tools to simulate running on an iPhone. You also are just going to have way less of an uphill battle using Apple’s tools and you’re likely to get better optimized binaries.
You also don’t have to build iOS apps with Swift; C++ and things like Qt can be used.
Also the iOS SDK isn’t freely available, so you’d have to copy that out of an Xcode installation… but given enough time and effort, you could almost certainly hack together a cross-compilation config for Clang that compiles an unsigned iOS app on Linux. Signing it might in fact be the bigger issue, since I’m not aware of any tools that sign Mach-O binaries on Linux.
Something to implement signing given the key to sign with could almost certainly be created.
I think the biggest reason this stuff hasn’t really happened is … there’s not much motivation and Apple will likely respond to such efforts unkindly so you might need to be a bit of a curious masochist (or at least in strange circumstances) to attempt such an effort 😅
4am@lemm.ee 5 days ago
Why wouldn’t they be able to? Acceptance to their App Store requires that apps be built with a trusted tool chain. Their reasoning is that it’s harder to built malicious apps that might make it past review if you’re using their tools.