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Comment by honkdaddy | Hacker News Reader

I can't think of a good reason Apple would want to support developers who want to publish in their (very) walled garden but aren't willing to purchase at least one macOS device. There are services which provide virtual Macs, this isn't meant to be one of them.

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It's a CI/CD, not an IDE. If you want to automatically test your code on all devices in a dozen configs on multiple OS versions, you're going to need to buy some fairly expensive hardware and host it yourself, which is not exactly where the industry is going at the moment with it's "yay cloud" movement.

You can already develop apps and publish them completely on iPadOS without a Mac.

Is it logical to do so? No but it is possible and Apple sanctioned. In fact it was featured at last years WWDC

> I can't think of a good reason Apple would want to support developers who want to publish in their (very) walled garden but aren't willing to purchase at least one macOS device.

Those devs aren't going to purchase Apple hardware whether Apple sells them cheeseburgers or not, so its more profitable for Apple to sell them cheeseburgers.

Education perhaps. Kids in middle school or lower might get iPads and not laptops, and programming can be part of their curriculum.

They actually have that one covered with Swift Playgrounds: https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

You can, in fact, write an app and publish it to Apple's App Store with it, all from an iPad. I have no idea how much actual uptake this has seen, since I think the capability only came out at the start of the year?

This is probably fixed now, but around the days of Swift versions 1-3, Playgrounds were straight up broken. Very basic programs would segfault the compiler. I feel bad for any kids who may have been introduced to programming that way.

The new Swift Playgrounds is far better than what came before it. Those versions were pretty much unusable for sustained work.

Very simple programs would segfault the compiler in 1-3 as well. You'd most often notice this as your syntax highlighting went away for a period of time.

Yeah, but it was even worse in Playgrounds somehow. They were unusable even for testing a one-line piece of code.

Playgrounds is mostly a local running environment if I am right ?

If you teach a class, having a CI build and run the programs, potentially taking screenshots for you to review later could be a pretty good use case, especially for remote home work.

"Xcode Cloud is a continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode and designed expressly for Apple developers."

This is a (presumably well-integrated) alternative to CircleCI. There's nothing about this particular product that would make it even remotely relevant for a middle school programming curriculum.

At any rate, what you're asking for already exists — Swift Playgrounds has been around for years, it's specifically tailored for learners, is kid-friendly, and already lets you take the whole journey from your first line of code to publishing on the App Store.

Hobbyist? Student? Education?

But of course that doesn't add to their monopoly profits :-)

Those categories don’t usually need a CI/CD solution.

The comment was in response to this, not CI/CD.

> I can't think of a good reason Apple would want to support developers who want to publish in their (very) walled garden but aren't willing to purchase at least one macOS device

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