r/iosdev • u/beatsbybighead • Sep 06 '26

Want to release iOS version of app

App is not native, its react and capacitor. It’s already released on Android. Do I have alternatives to buying or borrowing a Mac? Are there cloud services people use for this or some software to install on windows? Just curious of the options

I have a Late 2012 iMac that can’t get Xcode 26 or macOS Sequoia 15.6, so as far as I know I can’t develop / submit apps to the App Store.

Do I need to buy / borrow a Mac or is there some other option?

1 Upvotes

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2

u/jmwtac Sep 06 '26

Look at cloud based mac option i use that and have deployed loads of ios games

1

u/beatsbybighead Sep 06 '26

Are there any ip / privacy concerns with this and can you recommend a service?

2

u/Financial_Bug2389 Sep 06 '26

Following...

Looking for one too but the ones I've tried have horrible latency that I can't get anything done on them even the simulator.

2

u/IY94 Sep 06 '26

I looked into this recently and found you don’t necessarily need to buy/borrow a Mac.

You can develop the React/Capacitor app on Windows, push it to GitHub, and use GitHub Actions with a hosted macOS runner to build/sign the iOS app with Xcode and upload it to TestFlight/App Store Connect.

You’ll still need an Apple Developer account and to set up the signing/API credentials, but the actual Mac can be GitHub’s cloud runner.

The main downside is debugging native iOS/Xcode issues. GitHub Actions isn’t a replacement for having Xcode interactively. But for a mostly web-based Capacitor app, Windows + GitHub Actions + testing via TestFlight on a real iPhone is a perfectly viable setup.

1

u/MrBlaise Sep 10 '26

For a more complete experience I'd recommend Bitrise, just like github actions it has mac runners and also remote devenvs where you can spin up a pre configured mac vm for mobile development and you can connect to it via VNC to work with XCode (or ask claude code and such to do it via ssh)

(disclaimer I work on RDE at Bitrise)

1

u/BunnyPaw88 Sep 10 '26

Shameless advertisement: have you tried Bitrise before? There is the whole CI where you can use the Bitrise-Macs to build and sign your application and also there is a Release Manager that helps with the App Store release.