> gives X Code away for free

Free with the purchase of Apple hardware. Not exactly "free," is it?

VS Code works on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Nobody gives hardware for free.

> Nobody gives hardware for free.

Correct. And Apple artificially requires that you have a Mac to develop software for Mac or iOS.

Not even Microsoft does that. I can compile for Windows on any platform.

So, are complaining about the economical factor or an ideological one?

Xcode is the successor to Project Builder, the development environment for NeXT. It is written in Objective-C and AppKit.

Xcode was designed for writing Mac apps, why would anyone want to write Mac apps on a PC, when they'd need a Mac to test them anyway?

It's only after the iPhone that the question of a port to other platforms has arisen. But that would be a huge task equivalent to a full rewrite. Even Apple doesn't have the resources to pull that off smoothly.

> why would anyone want to write Mac apps on a PC, when they'd need a Mac to test them anyway?

There are many reasons. I was going to list a few, but ehh. If you want to know you can probably ask Google or StackOverflow.

And it also charges you 100$ a year plus half of what you earn on their app store.

*30%

Microsoft's revenue split for the Windows Store is an identical 30%[0] (in most cases). There is, of course, the benefit of not having to pay any annual registration fees on Microsoft's platform.

[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/windows/agreements/ap...

Negative. They just announced that developers will receive 95% of revenue for non-games when customers purchase via a deep link, or 85% when its purchased through a discovery mechanism Microsoft provides [1]. Going into affect later this year.

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/05/07/a-new-micr...

That's good to know. This only applies to what Microsoft calls "consumer non-gaming apps", however. Games and presumably what Microsoft considers professional apps are still subject to the existing fee structure.

For the time being, my comment stands.

That’s only for access to their store. Microsoft is much the same when it comes to the Windows store.

If you want to write apps for macOS and distribute them yourself you can do so with no cost.

VS community is free, as is SQL Express. Net Core is also open source and platform agnostic.

X Code is not a watered down version of something else. It’s the full application Apple uses themselves.

That was absolutely true when VS went by the "Express" moniker, but not today's "Community" edition. The difference between the paid (Pro) and free (Community) version is just licensing^. The Pro also comes with an MSDN subscription. MS is really going after the open source market, they've realized they were losing the future and embraced Linux/MacOS. FWIW, I use both Xcode and VS.

^and some "CodeLense" feature that I've never used.

http://www.visualstudioresources.com/2017/07/09/differences-...