You can buy a second-hand Mac and set up your development environment or you can use a free service like Codemagic to build the iOS binary that you can smoke test on an iOS device or share with your first users. One big advantage of Flutter is not having to build a whole new application for just iOS or any other OS for that matter, but using the existing project to ship for all platforms. When can you build and publish iOS applications without a Mac computer?

While iOS simulator will be enough in most cases, there are some scenarios where you should also test your application on a real device and push notifications are one of them. I would say one of the most notorious features that is ubiquitous across all apps that you will have to deal with is push notifications. Moreover, when a user logs a bug, you need to be able to reproduce the issue and it is likely that the problems that are reported are platform-specific. When can you not use Linux or Windows machine to develop iOS applications?Īs you probably may have guessed, having an iOS simulator or debugging iOS specific issues on macOS is invaluable. Consider this a user story to understand the context before starting feature development.

Let’s take a closer look at the problem statement and example use cases before going into the possible solution. This article is about how to build an iOS app and release it to your users. You cannot develop apps for iPhone or iPad without a Mac computer. Use M1 Mac mini VMs by default with Codemagic🚀 Build fasterīefore getting started, it’s important to articulate which problem are we going to solve.

You should also have an iOS device to smoke test the application.You need to buy the Apple Developer Program licence to code sign and publish the app.We will be using the Flutter iOS app from Codemagic sample projects in this example. In this post, we will walk you through how you can create a Flutter app on Linux or Windows and use Codemagic CI/CD to set up code signing for your iOS project and release the application to the App Store. With Flutter and Codemagic, you can build and distribute iOS apps without buying a Mac computer yourself. There is no sign of this changing any time soon, but there are still ways for app developers to build the app for iOS and release it to the App Store even if you don’t have a Mac. It’s hard to imagine developing apps for iOS without a Mac computer.

NB! there is a difference between developing iOS apps and building and publishing them with Codemagic. We are going to show how this is possible with Flutter and Codemagic. Learn from this post how to build and publish iOS apps if you’re working on Linux or Windows.

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