Member-only story

Do You Need a Mac to Develop Your iOS App?

Not anymore—you just need a Virtual Machine and the right tips

Riccardo Giorato
Better Programming
3 min readSep 12, 2019
Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash

Disclaimer

This article is intended for educational purposes only, to demonstrate that it’s possible to test out iOS applications with Xcode without having to buy a Mac. However, you should consider testing on a real MacOS device before publishing your application on the App Store.

All the Steps to Get Your First “Mac”

OK, now let’s discover how a “Mac” is made.

Requirements

You’ll need a computer running Windows or Linux (not tested) and an iOS device (iPad or iPhone). Also required:

  1. VMWare or VirtualBox
  2. USB 2.0, not 3.0
  3. An Apple Developer account
  4. Xcode 10.1 (no other versions)

VMWare or VirtualBox?

After having tested various MacOS versions on different virtual machine systems like VMWare and VirtualBox, I found that the quickest solution was VMWare Player 15 with High Sierra 10.13.

Newer versions of MacOS drastically reduce the performance of the system, probably due to newer graphic drivers that aren’t 100%…

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Responses (7)

What are your thoughts?