from Hacker News

Build iOS Apps on Linux and Windows

by plurby on 5/11/25, 8:10 AM with 54 comments

  • by DownrightNifty on 5/11/25, 10:34 PM

    Mega cool!

    We should all be taking full advantage of the amazing capabilities of the pocket supercomputers we all carry around with us at all times (even if the companies who make them don't want us to or don't care about us). Anything less would be silly! Now Linux and Windows users (the majority of iPhone users) can do easily do so, and that's great.

    To install your own personal homebrew apps without Apple's approval, use AltStore (Windows) or SideStore (Linux):

    https://faq.altstore.io/altstore-classic/how-to-install-alts...

    https://docs.sidestore.io/docs/installation/linux

  • by behnamoh on 5/11/25, 8:56 PM

    Why does Apple behave like there are no other operating systems or devices in the world? for a long time, even in their keynotes they would compare the new iphones with the last year model, not the flagship androids. and their standards mostly work for themselves, not the rest of the world. for example, most keybindings in Pages are totally different than Word and the rest of the text editing apps (CMD-E is supposed to center things but it doesn't). they created a language (Swift) and kept it closed source for a long time, and then didn't extend support to other OS's. presumably they do this so devs who wanna make iOS apps have to purchase Macs, but quite honestly this is just lazy corporate shenanigans. There are far more important reasons to buy a Mac, and anyone who uses Linux isn't suddenly going to convert to macOS just so they can build iOS apps (they probably have more fundamental issues with non-FOSS software anyway).

  • by andrewrn on 5/11/25, 3:52 PM

    Woah this is very exciting if true! I love Linux and my framework laptop, but have wanted to make simple iOS apps.

    That being said, PWA’s are damn capable at this point for basic little apps. I wish more laypeople were aware of the ability to “install” PWA’s. Most non-tech people only think apps come from the iOS App Store.

  • by weird_trousers on 5/11/25, 4:24 PM

    Awesome! I hope Apple will not get the lawyers out for this project (especially for licensing issues)... but this is promising for the future!

  • by preisschild on 5/11/25, 6:16 PM

    AFAIK the Apple EULA, which you have to agree to before uploading Apps to the App store, requires that you have built the software on Apple Hardware.

    IANAL, but if I understand correctly that means, the only conformant way to build on linux would be to you install linux on the Apple hardware.

  • by bsaul on 5/11/25, 11:10 PM

    i was thinking it would have used the swift build project https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-build recently released but i didn't find any mention of that.

    Did i miss something ?

  • by wmlive on 5/11/25, 6:53 PM

    The GNUstep project offers a similar tool:

    https://github.com/gnustep/libs-xcode

  • by justanotheratom on 5/11/25, 5:02 PM

    Note: you can also use it to replace Xcode on macOS for building iOS software!

    Also, there is an MCP Server to bypass Xcode from Cursor: https://github.com/cameroncooke/XcodeBuildMCP

  • by tonyhart7 on 5/12/25, 12:00 AM

    hope flutter integrate this fast