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AbdulSamad-1178 avatar image
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AbdulSamad-1178 asked DanielPrice-8533 answered

Don't have mac machine (or my own remote access), How can I debug my Xamarin App for iOS on Windows 10

Hi, I have my Android App developed in Xamarin with Visual Studio 2019 Community. The application working fine and become robust, now we need to provide an iOS build for that application, we do not have our own mac machine. Thanks

dotnet-xamarinvs-debugging
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DanielPrice-8533 avatar image
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DanielPrice-8533 answered

Unfortunately the issue is that Apple will only let you use XCode to compile an iOS application - even VS for Mac uses XCode to do the actual compilation.

What you can do however is to do all your development on a Windows PC and tell VS to compile it on any Mac you can connect to with Remote Desktop. At my organisation (a strictly Windows shop) we use a service called MacInCloud to rent Remote Desktop access to a Mac in a datacentre somewhere on a pay-as-you-go basis to compile and test our iOS app. It's probably not as responsive as testing locally on a physical device, but it got us out of a jam.

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ColeXia-MSFT answered ColeXia-MSFT commented

Hello,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A!

We can use Hot Restart to debug iOS application without mac , notice that there are some limitations with it , and we will still need a Mac machine to do a full compilation, signing, and deployment for your application to production.

However , recently it seems something wrong with Hot Restart , the app crash at opening , the fix will be released in next visual studio version ,check this issue : https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/13759 .


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So there is no possibility to develop IOS application in Windows PC ?

Can I also need mac if I develop IOS application using react native in Windows ?

1 Vote 1 ·

You don't need Mac to write your code. BUT you will need Mac to compile and publish your app on App Store.

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write your code mean, code and debugging, right ?

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Thanks for your reply,

So it seems not possible for now, Can I debug my application on device (iPhone 6, 7) similar like we do in Android using adb ?

Thanks

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Yes, but it still requires a mac .

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