this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Actually, the walled garden around xcode is infuriating. To develop for Apple you need current hardware running the latest operating systems. You have to stay squarely in their ecosystem to generate anything that builds for their mobile devices.
Are you a mobile dev?
My company has a multi-platform product. I have to support the developers in the build systems. Dealing with the iOS side of the build equation is the bain of my existence. Xcode updates locked to OS revisions, key chains that magically corrupt themselves, hardware lock-in keeping me from running real servers. Hostile attitude towards virtual machines.
Apple could really do a lot to make it easier.
How do you test without servers and VMs?
Perhaps Apple's walled garden is the reason why so many shitty mobile web apps exist. In a civilized world, Apple and Google would agree on a UI standard.
I don't think it's the reason why the app economy largely failed (sure, mobile games are a big exception). I hope the vibe shifts back to software being a tool to enhance productivity rather than a rube Goldberg machine for entertainment and ads.
Individual developers develop on Mac hardware. They do primary tests on Mac mobile devices.
For production and QA, our CI pipeline builds on a cluster of bare metal Mac Minis. Basic unit tests happen during the build. We deploy to mobile devices.
Mac doesn't make any server equipment anymore, We could technically run VMs on the minis. But they're not so expensive that we can't just have a cluster of them around. We even tried to do the hackintosh route with VMs. It was incredibly difficult to keep it stable, and every time we had to do a xcode update, It needed an OS update and it fucked over the hackintosh. I would have had to keep somebody on staff full-time just to keep the hackintosh VMs going.