I have developed a platform that will provide an Information Security service to Enterprise customers. The front-end is a Xamarin Forms application. A company signs up for the service and their Information Security team members install the app on their mobile devices.
I believe this use is not covered by the Apple Enterprise Developer program. The apps are not stand-alone app-store type apps. I cannot install by physically connecting the user’s iphone to my dev machine.
Is there a way to do this other than Test Flight? I am using Visual Studio 2019 from a Windows 10 PC (with a Mac on the same network, of course).
Have you looked at Visual Studio App Center? Not sure if it will fit your exact deployment needs but it may be something to look at if you haven't. I've just started using it and have had some success... but also some headaches too. Android distribution is a breeze but IOS in any shape form or fashion makes it difficult outside of their app store in my opinion.
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I apologize if this has been covered elsewhere. I have researched this topic to the best of my ability but I am still unsure of the answers I have found. I am a senior in college and I am developing an app to essentially act as a remote control for a device that my team is building for our senior capstone project. Everything is progressing fine for the Android app etc., but we are interested in developing an iOS app as well. We were steered toward Visual Studio 2015 or later for this since none of us own a Mac. We do not have an iPhone and we are not interested in trying to actually sell or deploy the app officially. All we really need is a means to simulate the iOS app on a PC and demonstrate that the functionality is still there to control our device.
I have seen several posts stating the requirement of a Mac regardless to, at the least, handle conversions for any app development on a Windows machine. I have also found a couple posts with a potential work around that involved installing a Mac VM, though I am not sure if these are "legal" solutions or not? We do not have it in our project budget to purchase any Mac systems, OS, or cloud services to develop the app. I have only done light work on Macs unrelated to programming so I know very little about what is possible regarding VMs etc.
At this point I am looking for some clarity on whether there is an actual legitimate and legal means to simulate an iOS app using Visual Studio and a Windows PC only? In our case, we would need the simulation to be able to connect to our device wirelessly and control it. It is OK that the physical device would actually be a Windows laptop, the CS department just wants to see that we have developed software that could in theory work on an iOS device. We would be presenting our work in detail during weekly updates so the solution would need to be above the table in all regards.
I apologize if this is answered elsewhere. The options in Visual Studio and most of the guides online are pretty unclear about what you can and can't do specifically under the various project types. We didn't want to get too deep into development with C# only to hit an impassable wall and lose all that time. It seems Apple keeps everything under close guard so I was suspicious about the VM alternatives to having a Mac. Thanks in advance for you time!
You must have a Mac to develop iOS apps, either to act as a build server, or as your primary development machine. Even when using Xamarin, the build tools and iOS Simulator are provided by Apple and will only run on Apple's OS. You can only legally run Mac OS on Apple hardware.
Just to add to the previous (and correct answer imo) which states that you need a mac to legally build IOS apps.
You don't need a powerful mac in order to do the building. I've been using a mac mini as a build server for a year now with no major problems. I wouldn't want to do any actual development on this machine, but it's great for sitting in the corner and doing builds sent via visual studio.
You can still do all IOS Dev on windows with visual studio (connected to the mac for building). Additionally with the enterprise version of VS you can run the IOS simulator on the PC, but again it requires a connected Mac. Although I'm hoping that they will eventually bring this functionality back to community users.
In your specific (academic) case whether or not you do manage to get a mac for building, I would suggest looking at Xamarin Test Cloud for providing evidence that your software will work on a large number of devices.
I am trying to set up Xamarin in Visual Studio 2015 to run iOS apps.
The problem I have is that I cannot connect with my Mac using the 'Mac Agent'.
I believe this is necessary in order to develop iOS on Windows.
I have an open question (here) on it from a technical perspective, but I wanted to check to see that I am not going down the wrong path with my troubleshooting without overloading the original post with a separate question.
And have the new question specific enough as to be picked up by other users asking the same.
Question: Does the use of Visual Studio (and the Mac agent to connect to OSX) require a full license of Xamarin or an Apple Developer account to work?
I can find nothing wrong technically so I'm wondering if the issue is elsewhere.
You should not need an Apple Developer account. However, using the Visual Studio integration requires a Xamarin business license.
We develop and sell enterprise apps distributed via Apple's Enterprise developer program: https://developer.apple.com/programs/enterprise/
What this basically means is that we self-host and install iOS apps on our client's employee devices without going through any sort of app-store layer from Apple. (the enterprise license lets companies self-sign and distribute arbitrary apps on non-jailbroken devices with no intervention from Apple)
With this in mind, would it be possible for us to push Unity3D incremental code-updates to our iOS users via:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/scriptsinassetbundles.html
(or any other method?)
Or are we still restricted to only non-code assets in iOS because of the compiler technology itself?
That documentation seems to imply that it wont work:
"If you want to include code in your AssetBundles that can be executed in your application it needs to be pre-compiled into an assembly and loaded using the Mono Reflection class (Note: Reflection is not available on platforms that use AOT compilation, such as iOS)"
MDM can be used to distribute (and manage app updates) on enterprise apps, without having to manually copy .ipa files around:
https://www.apple.com/support/business-education/mdm/
I just started developing for the iPhone with Xamarin free. I have the free edition and I don't have an Apple Development license.
Is it possible to jailbreak my iPhone 5s and deploy on the jailbroken iPhone? I read somewhere that it will be difficult because of Cydia.
And can I deploy with the free edition?
Tnx!
I do Xamarin development (with the business license but that doesn't matter) on my jailbroken iPhone 5s on iOS 7.0.6 with no problems.
However, if you are asking if you can develop jailbreak tweaks with the xamarin tools, that is a different thing. I want to know that exact thing so I asked a question here but didn't really find a good solution. You would have to compile it to a library (not an application) that your tweak would reference. Your other problem is that you would probably want to use a private API that Xamarin doesn't expose/wrap.
Xamarin, now, allows you to deploy to device with the Starter edition as long as the app is below a certain size.
Lastly, this is probably the biggest killer for you, you can't deploy to your device without being in the apple developer program. You need to have certificates to sign your builds and make publishing profiles to allow your phone to run ad-hoc/debug builds which can only be made through apple's dev site. This is also where you can register your device(s) as a testing device.
I am about to embark on some mobile development projects but I'm doing a little homework first. My primary goal is to deploy to Android and iOS, but the latter is posing some problems because I do not have access to (nor do I have any interested in acquiring) a Mac.
Phonegap offers a cloud service where you can upload your mobile development project and they will do the building for you - no Mac required. From the Phonegap Build FAQ:
Simply upload your web assets - a ZIP file of HTML, CSS and
JavaScript, or a single index.html file - to PhoneGap Build, point us
to your Git or SVN repository, or let us set up a git remote endpoint
that you can push to. Then we’ll undertake the compilation and
packaging for you. In minutes, you’ll receive the download URLs for
all mobile platforms.
I am leaning toward the development and native UI capabilities of Appcelerator, but since I do not have a Mac, is there any hope for me using Titanium for iOS development using something akin to PhoneGap's Build service?
If you dont have a Mac you will not be able to develop, test, deploy, or put in the app store applications for iOS, with or without using Titanium.
Regardless, even if you were able to use a cloud build technology with Titanium (which does not exist) you wont be able to deploy your final application to the App Store because you have to have XCode for that, the same goes for PhoneGap. Check this here:
Note: Since PhoneGap Build uses Apple's standard development process to build applications, >you will need to sign up for their developer program to build iOS applications on PhoneGap >Build. You will also need a Mac to configure your certificate and provisioning profile.
Bottom line, unless you use a mac, your not legally deploying to the App Store.
Don't be forgetting the registration fees that come with signing up as Both a google play & iOS developer.
I fear that using a remote service is going to cost you dearly in time, as you'll be significantly increasing your test cycle.
The cost of a second hand Mac mini is hardly going to impact any development budget, even charity work. And as the previous poster note, you can't legally deploy your completed build without a mac. If you made macs, wouldn't you do the same?
There are services cropping up like Mobundler.com and Foundry22.com which let you do end to end development without a Mac.
Foundry22 is a service similar to PhoneGap build, for Titanium SDK. Similar to PhoneGap build, it requires p12 bundle for iOS signing and Java keystore for Android. You can use service like Mobundler to create those using just your browser. You still need to pay to become part of iOS developer program.
The answer here is outdated.
There is an Icenium platform which will allow you to build and put your app on App Store without using Mac at all.
http://docs.icenium.com/publishing-your-app/distribute-production/publish-ios