iirc, it costs $99 a year to be able to upload apps on the apple app store rather than a one-time $25 on android. Also, apple test flight or whatever has a limited amount of people who can use it, rather than just installing an apk on android. Apple's ecosystem makes it much harder for open source or small apps to exist for iOS devices.

[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 46 points 1 year ago

Also android has FDroid, which is free, and libre.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe the tools for iOS development are only available on Mac.

[–] Jumper775@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not completely true. The best by far is xcode, but swift is open source so if you develop your own toolkit instead of SwiftUI and replace all other proprietary *Kit then any old computer can do it. You can also use (usually cross platform) frameworks which have already done all of this like react native which makes it really easy to do in other OSes, however you will still only get the best experience using native libraries which can only be built from Xcode on a Mac. Maybe darling will open the doors to running that on Linux one day though!

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you sure about this? Even if you build in Flutter or RA, you still need a Mac or a cloud service Mac to build for devices.

[–] Jumper775@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I’ve done some limited research, and it should be possible to build from anything if you don’t use any apple specific cpu features or frameworks etc. that being said, that will be a pretty bad experience so I assume these services require a Mac for that reason. I could be wrong about react native though, only found one questionable source that said you could.

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You cannot. Both flutter and react native still requires code to build an iOS app afaik. Source: I have to do this sht sometimes at work.

[–] pexavc@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

The Vapor project is a good example for what you are alluding to.

Server side swift doesn’t require a Mac, just Unix.

[–] angrymouse@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Technically you can, but no at least mediocre framework supports it, for the thread context it seems just bike shading

[–] lud@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How much harder would that be? Is react common on most open source projects? It feels like everyone in atleast the linux community hates it .

[–] Jumper775@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

I don’t know, never used it. Just know that it exists and can do that.