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Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

scottwillsey.com

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Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#211

Post by justincormack »

codazoda wrote: post #78

One down-side to this is that it does require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox. I do this too and there are lots of problems I can't solve in a sandbox. I know a lot of you are throwing your hands up at the years of security practices we're throwing out the window when we do that. The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my ch…

Use Secretive so your ssh keys are stored in the secure enclave. Keeping private keys in files is the 1990s security…

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#212

Post by user43928 »

999_cirno wrote: post #105
codazoda wrote: post #78

One down-side to this is that it does require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox. I do this too and there are lots of problems I can't solve in a sandbox. I know a lot of you are throwing your hands up at the years of security practices we're throwing out the window when we do that. The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my ch…

> require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox You don't have to! All recent Macs come with nearly zero perf cost virtualization. You can easily run Mac or Linux VMs assuming same architecture. Use it all the time for development and whatever. Use Tart [1] or VirtualBuddy [2], both open-source, for a packaged solution. Or in the spirit of this post, vibe code your own wrapper around the OS API [3]…

Does anyone actually use one of those for iOS development?

Linux VMs are not relevant here. For downloading Xcode and building apps, I believe one needs to sign in with their Apple account.

Does this work well with a macOS VM?

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#213

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #193
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. I usually use Xcode GUI, but there's been a lot of discussion about using a CLI workflow, for many years. Should be easy to find. Hope you like long argument lists. xcodebuild has a crazy long parameter list. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/xcode-comman...

From my experience the CLI works but is not well documented.

They rely on manpages, but using CLI tools is old enough, that there’s been plenty of online discussion on the practice.

LLMs will often use CLI tools. In my experience, they loves their CLI.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#214

Post by 999_cirno »

user43928 wrote: post #212
999_cirno wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox You don't have to! All recent Macs come with nearly zero perf cost virtualization. You can easily run Mac or Linux VMs assuming same architecture. Use it all the time for development and whatever. Use Tart [1] or VirtualBuddy [2], both open-source, for a packaged solution. Or in the spirit of this post, vibe code your own wrapper around the OS API [3]…

Does anyone actually use one of those for iOS development? Linux VMs are not relevant here. For downloading Xcode and building apps, I believe one needs to sign in with their Apple account. Does this work well with a macOS VM?

Yes! That is arguably the killer feature. You can virtualize macOS in macOS with (nearly) native speed and this is officially supported. Heck, even can run multiple of them at the same time.

See docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vir...

And projects like Tart, VirtualBuddy, etc. provide convenient wrappers for these APIs.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#215

Post by fragmede »

999_cirno wrote: post #214
user43928 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone actually use one of those for iOS development? Linux VMs are not relevant here. For downloading Xcode and building apps, I believe one needs to sign in with their Apple account. Does this work well with a macOS VM?

Yes! That is arguably the killer feature. You can virtualize macOS in macOS with (nearly) native speed and this is officially supported. Heck, even can run multiple of them at the same time. See docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vir... And projects like Tart, VirtualBuddy, etc. provide convenient wrappers for these APIs.

The limit is two. You are not allowed to run more than two macOS VMs. Also Tart VMs have problems with signing into icloud and other things that need a real secureID enclave.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#216

Post by geraneum »

MindSpunk wrote: post #201
geraneum wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you, but we're talking about affordability which is a different topic. > It's especially nice when you work on projects that aren't iOS/Apple native and you don't get Mac workstations. If you develop natively for macOS, then you probably need the OS for it. It's the same for Linux and Windows. But building is not the biggest hurdle because you can build in your usage-based-billed/free CI as well…

I'm not really sure how any machine is more affordable than the $0 it should cost because you shouldn't need a Mac. It's absolutely true that you can get by with a base spec Mac Mini, but often you can't with bigger projects and the cost skyrockets because Apple prices memory like kidneys (current market conditions aside, they've always done it). I have nothing against the hardware. I despise how artificial the probl…

> I don't need a vendor's special-sauce computer to build for consoles.

This is ironic. Of course you do. You're already using it. You just happen to like the Microsoft's walled garden and not Apples. That's fine, but let's not pretend that "Windows centric" is anything but another monopolistic and exclusionary ecosystem. If you want to use Nvidia drivers, or develop against DirectX, can you do it on a macOS? I get the criticism of Apple's walled garden and I'm against it too, but not from your position.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#217

Post by matwood »

theraven wrote: post #68

Interesting this is coming across as novel. This is how CI build machines for Apple’s platforms have been setup in perpetuity.

Not just build machines. Years ago I scripted the entire build process to create hundreds of apps based on parameters and submit them. It was an attempt to work around the horrible App Store search. The original app had packages of content that could be purchased, but it was hard to convey from the single app listing. Eventually Apple said don't do that and we reverted back, but at that point we had moved on to something completely different.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#218

Post by ahk-dev »

fragmede wrote: post #83
codazoda wrote: post #78

One down-side to this is that it does require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox. I do this too and there are lots of problems I can't solve in a sandbox. I know a lot of you are throwing your hands up at the years of security practices we're throwing out the window when we do that. The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my ch…

On a Mac. Just get a Mac mini. It doesn't have to be a crazy big beefy one, and if you're selling apps, it's a justifiable business expense.

[flagged]

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#219

Post by miki123211 »

codazoda wrote: post #78

One down-side to this is that it does require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox. I do this too and there are lots of problems I can't solve in a sandbox. I know a lot of you are throwing your hands up at the years of security practices we're throwing out the window when we do that. The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my ch…

There's a spectrum between a restrictive sandbox and full YOLO mode, may 2025 style.

You can have something like Claude's auto approvals. You can poke specific holes in the sandbox (E.G. my Codex one can write to ~/go, ~/.cache and ~/.cargo). You can have explicit deny rules that hard-deny and bypass the sandbox and auto-approval. You can allow certain commands to bypass sandbox execution entirely.

While those aren't secure in theory (if you let a third party type prompts into the agent, they will likely be able to exfiltrate your data), they're secure against agent carelessness and AI stupidity in practice.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#220

Post by mlrtime »

kxxx wrote: post #41

I've been building and testing my iOS app just for fun via Linux only. Surprisingly, it's very easy. This works like a charm: https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool You do not need to upload to TestFlight or the App Store; you can just install the app locally to your iPhone via usb -- even from Linux! When in doubt, just ask your coding agent of choice to help you create and upload a Hello World iOS app. It's really easy…

I'm not an ios developer so forgive me...

So you can develop ios apps, run it on a real iphone that is activated without going through app store as a native app? But, you have to reinstall it every week?

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