iPhone development in Windows

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Original post by Headkaze I heard that it's possible to compile iPhone binaries in Windows...

Not with the official SDK, though. Any binaries built from Windows would be using various "homebrew" development toolchains, and would probably only be deployable to jailbroken iPhones.

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Would I be better off running Mac OS X on a virtual machine...

The end user license agreement for OS X forbids that, for one thing. For another, you'd need a few extensions/tweaks to the common virtual machine platforms to get them running OS X - specifically, the addition of an EFI emulator of some sort to their virtual hardware.

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...is the iPhone SDK tighly integrated with the Mac OS?

It's fairly tightly integrated with Xcode, which only runs on Mac OS X.

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Also are there software emulators for testing iPhone applications or do you have to have the hardware to develop for iPhone?

The iPhone SDK includes the iPhone Simulator. It will also allow you to transfer an image onto a physical device and debug remotely.

Thanks Oluseyi

So is anyone using Windows to write apps or games for the iPhone? Can anyone give me some idea if it's viable or should I just forget Windows for iPhone dev?

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Original post by Headkaze Thanks Oluseyi So is anyone using Windows to write apps or games for the iPhone? Can anyone give me some idea if it's viable or should I just forget Windows for iPhone dev?

I heard it's possible, but I think it would be easier just to make your pc into a hackintosh. I think leopard runs very slow under vmware (if you even get it working). Better off just doing a proper install.

Don't forget that if you're planning to make your app available via the iPhone App Store you also have to become a member of the iPhone Developer Network at about $99/year. Just pointing out that if you're not going that route, then going the "jailbreak" route that you CAN do from Windows may be ok anyway.

I developed my game using Visual Studio. I created a simple iPhone "simulator" and with some conditionally compiled code made it run under both VS and XCode.

I develop and test using Visual Studio (the editor is light years beyond XCode). Then I compile under XCode against the same code base.

This works fine for a pure OpenGL game. You'd run into problems if you wanted to use a ton of Mac libraries.

You would still have to have access to a Mac (or at least OSX) to create the binary. And to do final testing. There are things that just don't translate to the screen such as the accelerometers and multitouch. On top of overall gameplay feel, memory usage, and sound coming from that tiny speaker.


I'd be willing to share the framework. It is pretty specific to what I am doing, but it might be enough to point you in the right direction. Email me at my username + gmail.com

Seems like an awful lot of effort to avoid XCode, considering that you have to use it in the end anyways.
Actually, I think XCode compares pretty well against VS, once you learn how to use it. I admit for a Windows developer it's quite a steep learning curve (the keyboard layout is the hardest part IMHO)

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Original post by captainfreedom I admit for a Windows developer it's quite a steep learning curve (the keyboard layout is the hardest part IMHO)

You do know that the keyboard layout is 100% rebind-able, right? There are a couple of binding sets floating around out there, in particular emacs and vim bindings - I doubt a VS setup would be that much harder.

Well, it's really the editor key combinations that give me the problems, not XCode commands