How can I develop for iPhone using a Windows development machine?

Answer 1

YOU CAN DEVELOP IPHONE APPS ON WINDOWS PC. I've done it, with complex apps. And it works perfectly. You can develop iphone apps without ever seeing a mac or iphone.

You can develop on windows an HTML (or better: HTML5) app, using tools like Sencha or JQTouch, or mobi1. (They used to all be free for a while)

Then you use openSSL to sign the app. And Adobe PhoneGAP Build service to build IPhone App.

But you need the iphone developer licence to install it on an iphone. But you don't need a mac or iphone at any minute to compile, build or test it - all that is done ON THE PC.

I've done it, and it works perfectly. (But with Android type responsiveness - not as fast as a native IPhone app)

You could also use a program from the the Babylonian era (circa 300 bc) running C and C++ called dragonfly. If your app has one or two screens with limited interactivity, and many calculations, go for it. It includes an emulator. You compile to the iphone at the press of a button. (Not sure, but I think you do need a developers license in any case)

And then there is Xamarin. You develop in C# with special calls to native code. You'll have to learn the environment.

Answer 2

Check out this:

Over view

It is a project that attempts to be able to cross-compile programs written in a variety of source languages to a variety of target languages. One of the initial test cases was to write programs in Java and run them on an iPhone. Watching the video on the site is worthwhile.

With that said, I haven't tried it. The project seems quite beta, and there isn't a lot of activity on their SourceForge site.

Answer 3

Try macincloud.com It allows you to rent a mac and access it through RDP remote control. You can then use your PC to access a mac and then develop your apps.

Answer 4

If you want to create iPhone apps but no Mac, then you should try http://www.pmbaty.com/iosbuildenv/

It allows you to easily develop native iOS apps, like with XCode, deployable on any iPhone, iPod or iPad (jailbroken or not).

Use your favourite IDE to code in Objective-C, C++, C or ARM assembly, like in XCode. ARC and blocks are supported.

Compile your iPhone apps directly inside Visual Studio

It works on Windows all versions (XP, 7, 8), FreeBSD and Linux

Now with iOS8 support.

Answer 5

You don't need to own a Mac nor do you need to learn Objective-C. You can develop in different environments and compile into Objective-C later on.

developing for the iphone and ipad by runing osx 10.6(snow leopard)

This article one of our developers wrote gives a pretty comprehensive walk through on installing OS X Snow Leopard on Windows using iBoot, then installing Vmware (with instructions), then getting your iPhone dev environment going... and a few extra juicy things. Super helpful for me.

Hope that helps. It uses Phonegap so you can develop on multiple smart phone platforms at once.

Answer 6

As has been pointed you can attempt to use the WinChain but if you are a newbie coder it won't be easy.

The iPhone SDK will work on Hackintoshes (a normal PC with OS X installed on it). I know as I have one and it does.

So after you go buy an OSX license you could TRY to install it on your PC on a different drive using Boot-132 or one of the other installers like iDeneb. The issue you will have to do a lot of tinkering and things still won't work quite right.