Instead of having Xcode be available on PCs, which we all know are free to own.

Yeah, right.

I guess the point is you might already own a PC, and you could use that for developing Android apps, for example. But if you also want to use Xcode and develop iOS apps as well then you have to buy a Mac.

> you might already own a PC [...] if you also want to use Xcode and develop iOS apps as well then you have to buy a Mac.

You might already own a Mac.

And if you own a Mac it costs $0 to develop for any other platform. See the imbalance here?

No, it costs 100 euros to get a proper Windows license.

No, you don't need a Windows license to develop for Windows. That's the whole point here. You can code and compile binaries for Windows, Linux, Android, etc. from many IDEs and virtually any platform under the sun. You can code and compile binaries for Apple products from exactly one IDE and exactly one platform: Apple's.

Of course you need Windows to develop Win32 and now UWP apps.

If you mean cross compiling from other OSes into Windows, good luck creating anything beyond CLI apps based on POSIX.

Ah but there is Wine! Not really, there are tons of Windows features that it doesn't support, and probably never will.

And if you mean Web apps, then I also develop Webapps for Mac without having one around.

If that is the point it's not a very good one.

While I understand your point, I would gently argue that to develop a truly great macOS or iOS app, you somewhat need to live in the Apple ecosystem to understand the design guidelines and quality that Apple customers have come to expect.

I bet the most downloaded apps these days are ground up cross platform and identical on every platform, e.g. steam, spotify, and web browsers. Relying on proprietary apple features that you have to clumsily port over to another OS would waste a lot of your time as a dev. You'd probably do your best troubleshooting on a cheap, under powered hackintosh than a model year macbook pro, to be honest.

Fair point. I tend to not like those cross-platform apps because of their generally-degraded performance so my previous comment showed a bit of my underlying bias.

Yes. But parent didn't contest that. They rather made the point that you have to pay to "live" in that ecosystem. MacOS is officially only supported on Apple hardware ... So it's not free and the fact that XCode is is therefore a moot point to that line of reasoning.

You need a Mac anyway, and the costs of a Mac is peanuts compared to the costs of a developer.