sbirdApr 14, 2025

How are the blatant anti-competitive practices of Apple just…allowed? How is this even possible?

https://lemmy.world/post/28204204

How are the blatant anti-competitive practices of Apple just…allowed? How is this even possible? - Lemmy.World

For example: - You MUST use Apple’s own apps (iMessage, Phone, etc.) as well as Apple’s own App Store - To be fair, the EU is doing work to solve this particular issue…but most of the reforms are only for EU customers - You have to use WebKit when developing a browser for MacOS or iOS, you can’t use Gecko or Blink - iOS apps must be developed using XCode, which is only available on MacOS… That last one is weird. Why can’t you compile Swift outside of MacOS (i.e. third party IDEs)? Why can only XCode do it?

Show threadExtremeDullardApr 14, 2025
What the hell rock have you been living under? Apple has been an abusive walled garden for many years.
Show threadsbirdApr 14, 2025
I’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)
Show threadDark Arc

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.

Apr 14, 2025 at 12:51pmWeb
Show threadpaperplaneApr 14, 2025
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.
Show threadDark ArcApr 14, 2025

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 😅