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

Answer 1

Oracle VirtualBox allows users to install Mac OS X in a virtual machine. If you are comfortable with it, you could just use that way to use Xcode. This is legal if you "dual boot" your mac into windows, then install the VirtualBox within windows (or linux).

Other possibilities are cross-compilers such as Appcelerator Titanium (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) or MonoTouch (.NET).

Answer 2

You can install OSX on PC but experience wont be great and it needs lot of work. Alternate is to use a framework/SDK Codename one: which is based on JAVA and can be used to code in WP8, Android, iOS on Windows (eclipse) with all extensive features

Features Overview:

1. Full Android environment with super fast android simulator
2. An iPhone/iPad simulator with easy to take iPhone apps to large screen iPad in minutes.
3. Full support for standard java debugging, profiling for apps on any platform.
4. Easy themeing / styling – Only a click away

More at Develop Android, iOS iPhone, WP8 apps using Java Disclaimer: This is my review for the product

Answer 3

Xamarin is a solid choice. It was purchased by Microsoft and is now built directly into Visual Studio. You code in C#. With all the updates and features they are adding, you can do everything but submit to the App Store from Windows, even compile, build and deploy to an iOS device.

For games, Unity 3D is a great option. The editor is free to use for development, and even for distribution (if you have less than 100K USD in annual revenue). Unity supports iOS, Android and most other platforms. It may be possible to use Unity's "Cloud Build" feature to avoid having to use a Mac for deployment, although by default Unity actually spits out an Xcode project when building for iOS.

Other options:

PhoneGap (html/javascript) also works. It isn't quite as nice for gaming, but it's pretty decent for regular GUI applications.

Flutter (dart) is a free cross platform mobile app development framework from Google. Write your code in Dart.

React Native (javascript) is another popular cross-platform framework created by Facebook.

Note that: for all of these options, all or most of the development can be done on Windows, but a MacOS device is still required to build a binary for submission to the App Store. One option is to get a cheap MAC Mini to do your final build.

Answer 4

Hooray! You can now more easily accomplish this with the latest Xamarin.iOS, using a network-linked mac providing the build and deployment capabilities.

See here for more details:

introduction to xamarin ios for visual studio

Answer 5

Two other options

1. Titanium Developer - free community edition - write in HTML/JavaScript - compile with Xcode (requires a Mac or VM)

2. OpenPlus ELIPS Studio - write in Flex, compile on Xcode (requires a Mac or VM) - they just started charging for their product however.

I think there may be 'toolchain' options for these and some of the others mentioned, which allow you to compile to binary on Windows, and I have seen that you can upload a zip file and have a toolchain style compile done for you online, but this goes against the Apple licensing.

If I am not mistaken, a product such as Titanium that outputs/works with Xcode and does not use any 3rd party / alternative / restricted libraries should be in compliance, because you are ultimately compiling in xcode - normal Objective-C code and libraries.

Answer 6

Develop iOS Apps on Windows With Cross-Platform Tools

Cross-platform tools are awesome: you code your app once, and export it to iOS and Android. That could potentially cut your app development time and cost in half. Several cross-platform tools allow you to develop iOS apps on a Windows PC, or allow you to compile the app if there’s a Mac in your local network.

Well, not so fast…

The cross-platform tool ecosystem is very large. On the one side you have complete Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Xamarin, that allow you to build cross-platform apps with C#.

The middle ground is covered by tools like PhoneGap, Cordova, Ionic and Appcelerator, that let you build native apps with HTML5 components. The far end includes smaller platforms like React Native that allow you to write native apps with a JavaScript wrapper.

The one thing that stands out for all cross-platform tools is this: they’re not beginner friendly! It’s much easier to get access to a Mac, learn Swift, and build a simple app, than it is to get started with Xamarin.

Most of the cross-platform tools require you to have a basic understanding of programming, compilation options, and the iOS and Android ecosystems. That’s something you don’t really have as a beginner developer!

Having said that, let’s look at a couple of options:

If you’re familiar with Windows-based development tools and IDEs, and if you already know how to code, it’s worthwhile to check out Xamarin. With Xamarin you code apps in C#, for multiple platforms, using the Mono and MonoTouch frameworks. If you’re familiar with web-based development, check out PhoneGap or Ionic. You’ll feel right at home with HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript. Don’t forget: a native app works different than a website… If you’re familiar with JavaScript, or if you’d rather learn to code JavaScript than Swift, check out React Native. With React Native you can code native apps for iOS and Android using a “wrapper”. Always deliberately choose for cross-platform tools because it’s a smart option, not because you think a native platform language is bad. The fact that one option isn’t right, doesn’t immediately make another option smarter!

If you don’t want to join the proprietary closed Apple universe, don’t forget that many cross-platform tools are operated by equally evil companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe and Amazon.

An often heard argument against cross-platform tools is that they offer limited access to and support for smartphone hardware, and are less “snappy” than their native counterparts. Keep in mind that any cross-platform tool will require you to write platform-specific code at one point, especially if you want to code custom features.