The homebrew/jailbreak community have a custom toolchain called Theos (https://theos.dev/) which enables you to cross-compile to iOS devices without a Mac. I don't know how legal it is, but it's really frustrating that we aren't seeing more efforts to develop tools like this since so many companies and individuals are scared of pissing off Apple.

I think you're going to struggle to publish to the App Store without a mac of some form. There's too much signing and stuff that requires apple devices for authentication.

I solved this with a Mac Mini that lives at home on my desk and was only used for the occasional bit of testing, debug and publishing (I was building using Flutter).

You can make a virtual machine very easily but it performs very poorly:

https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

Or you can lease them online:

http://macstadium.com/

GitHub has some kind of Mac hardware or virtualization for their Actions too so you could probably wire something up to build on GitHub:

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-swift

You can also rent a full Mac mini from MacStadium and access it via VNC/SSH if you need. For ongoing projects though, where you don't need the hosting aspect, it would be cheaper to just buy a used Mac.

At my current place of work, we have a rack of Mac mini’s in a closet as our build server for the iOS app. I was kind horrified and amazed to learn of this at first, but it really is normal. It’s impressive what gymnastics Apple compels us to go through :)

> At my current place of work, we have a rack of Mac mini’s in a closet as our build server for the iOS app.

One of the main selling points that Apple uses to sell Mac minis is their use in build farms and render farms.

If you click on Apple's page on Mac minis and scroll down until the 6th or 7th selling point, you'll end up seeing the part where according to Apple it's combination of stackable form factor and performant hardware makes it ideal to compile large xcode projects or perform video encoding.

I wonder if Apple is building their OS and Apps on Apple hardware or if they have real servers in their data center.

It must be quite common, or companies wouldn't sell dedicated rack mounts for these:

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacmini.html

Minis are also common in homelabs. Small, cheap when used (even cheaper if it's your own old machine), and natively runs a Unix-like environment for each management and can easily boot into Linux instead. I suspect the switch to Apple silicon is going to change that, however.

I could see that switching to Intel Nuc and Intel Clear Linux instead.

That shift already seems to be happening. If you follow /r/homelab, plenty of people are building large homelabs using nothing but NUCs they paid $250 each. It's not uncommon to see racks with 4-8 of them networked together (you usually only see 1-2 Minis). There are also some AMD-based machines coming out that are that size, so there will be even more options available.

The small things have gotten better for Linux, and haven't moved much further ahead on other platforms.

> Can't debug issues in Safari without borrowing a Mac

Run hackintosh on thinkpads. There are a lot of already completed configs available for both the clover and opencore setups.

For debugging issues in Safari, Browserstack should be good enough.