Still proprietary though, right? With underlying free libraries and compilers?

Yes, it's gratis, not libre. I understood the parent comment to be referring to the price.

I understood it the other way. Proprietary cables to free tools. ️

The components that are specific to the Mac, such as the GUI builder, are closed source. All the underlying tooling and technologies such as the LLVM compiler stack, Clang, etc are published by Apple as open source and widely used on other platforms.

If you want to publish your stuff in the AppStore, or just install it on your own iDevice, you have to pay a yearly subscription fee.

> install it on your own iDevice, you have to pay a yearly subscription fee.

Not true anymore [1]

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43932076/how-to-build-ap...

Not only do you still have to hassle with Apple's clunky provisioning profiles, it only lasts for a week and you're almost guaranteed to get an error message because you reached the device limit with as much as one device.

> Not only do you still have to hassle with Apple's clunky provisioning profiles

No you don't. XCode takes care of all of that automatically, I haven't had to hassle with provisioning profiles in years.

You provide anecdotal evidence (like me) as it requires me to set it manually to work and it has been so for about a year.

What do you need to 'set manually' ? You check 'automatically manage signing' and select your team from the list (if you're in multiple teams) and it should Just Work™.

It's ridiculous apple still forces anyone who wants to publish to its platform to have a mac. Had to jump through ridiculous hoops to get automated builds for an iOS app working since our build farm is all Linux (of course).