This does generally work, but it requires a lot of manual effort to setup the environment correctly with Xcode's SDKs to satisfy the compiler / linker.
Also a mac mini is £700 which is the equivalent of ~3 days work for most trades here in Britain. I you value your time as much as a joiner and if it’s going to take you more than 3 days to get your environment setup and keep it maintained then you’re better off just buying a mac.
I work in games for a fully remote company. a Mac mini takes ~5 hours to compile and cook (read: prep the assets) for our game. It's not reasonable to ask someone to have that mac at home, and even if it was, you have to have it somewhere where it's available, has high speed internet, and that person is responsible for the hardware - making sure it stays on when it's needed etc. That person also needs to deal with any hardware failures/ warranty replacements. Instead, we could lease a mac from AWS for £20 for a day, run a build and use that.
That doesn't mean that this is a scalable solution for running our business on, but for the occasional one off mac build to make sure it's not fallen behind, it works just fine for us.
The difference between $20 per day and $2.40 per day at our current scale is practically 0 - we do a build every 2 weeks or so. We would save $500 a year on our current scale, which is likely less than it would cost in my salary to set up a scaleway account, spin up an M1 instance and configure it. Definitely worth it if/when we look at having more machines up and running though, thanks!
In some other countries I have seen an iMac been shared across teams that would take turns at the device.
In Germany I would state the same statement, we live between Windows and macOS on the office, but I also have some care for those that aren't so lucky.
Plus, I’ve found that most iOS codebases, tend to rely on parts of Foundation and the Objective-C runtime that are not implemented on Linux, even if the code doesn’t touch UIKit at all.
In this case I meant taking an approach similar to this one for bazel[0] that is not limited to only code that works on Linux. It would only allow you to build on Linux and would require any testing / running would still happen on macOS, but that might still be worth it in some cases. Theoretically you could deploy your iOS app that way as well.
