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You can semi not buy into the apple ecosystem at the moment. Purchase a 2nd hand iphone and then run this Docker based OSX system: https://github.com/sickcode

You can semi not buy into the apple ecosystem at the moment. Purchase a 2nd hand iphone and then run this Docker based OSX system: https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX It's fine for personal projects using something like usbfluxd to talk to your iphone from the docker container. I wouldn't rely on it to do commercial work.

chrismorgan 5y ago
The cheapest second hand iPhones that run the current version of iOS (but are right at the tail of any support) are on the high side of the price range of what I’ve ever spent on a new, primary phone that I expect to last me at least several years. (And although it’s not as common as the alternative, I’m hardly alone in not spending much on phones; now laptops, on the other hand—.) I don’t want to spend more on a device that I might use once every few months.
- jjcon 5y ago
  If you don't daily drive an iPhone and you don't want to buy into Apples ecosystem, why do you want to develop for their ecosystem (which of course requires $100 a year to do so)? Genuinely curious cause I see a lot of people with this sentiment, is it for work related purposes or something? Or testing of web work potentially?
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    For myself, it’s mostly web stuff with Safari and Safari on iOS that I’d really like to be able to test from time to time.
    - exikyut 5y ago
      Then macOS + Xcode + simulator would probably be the most cost-effective solution. *(Small glance at QEMU)*
      - chrismorgan 5y ago
        Yeah, because I can’t use macOS without violating its EULA or forking out even more hundreds of dollars for a Mac Mini. :-(
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      There's a ton of companies out there who have real iPhones, iPads etc you can rent by the minute through a web browser to test your code or web sites. i.e. https://www.browserstack.com/test-on-iphone https://www.browserstack.com/test-on-iphone I'm just trying to find the one I use to test my emoji stuff, since Safari is the only one that displays emoji domains correctly.
      - simion314 5y ago
        Browser stack did not had the betas or the just released Safari versions, we had to depend on someone in our team risking upgrading to latest OSX to be able to debug with just released Safari that broke WebGL on desktop too. We do not target mobile users, we are fixing any bugs reported for Safari that are our code , but we only daily test with Firefox and Chrome because the developers and testers are using Windows or Linux(the team is in Europe)
  - gman83 5y ago
    I have some sideproject apps that I built with Flutter that I use on my Android phone, and I would make them available on iOS if I didn't have to pay any money to do so.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      So the question is why would I as a consumer want to buy a least common denominator app using a cross platform framework that wasn’t actually tested on real hardware?
      - lucb1e 5y ago
        You can always uninstall it if it's crap right? It would be available to you as a choice, and now it's simply not available.
        kitsunesoba 5y ago
        If the App Store becomes full of “checkbox ports” it’s going to be even more difficult to navigate than it already is. Part of that is on Apple for not investing more in discovery, but copious numbers of low effort ports isn’t a good thing to have anyway. In the game world, bad ports of console games to PC and bad ports of games from any other platform to the Switch are one of the most consistent gripes — quite often the sentiment surrounding them is that they’d be better off not existing.
        borland 5y ago
        The app store has been full of "checkbox ports" since about 6 months after it launched
        freedomben 5y ago
        You're showing your cards as an android person ;-) I agree with you, but nearly everyone on apple products will not. I get a (too me very perplexing) very similar respose when I ask things like, "why would it hurt people who want an Apple curated app store experience to allow a buried setting in the settings menu that allows sideloading for the few people who want that?"
- mattl 5y ago
  An iPhone SE 1st Generation can be had for around $70. What phones are you buying?
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    OK, I was looking at iPhone 6S, a glance at eBay Australia suggests they’re starting somewhere around AUD150. iPhone SE 1st generation looks to be starting at more like AUD120. I spent around AUD150 on each of my first two phones. Last year I splurged on a PinePhone (around AUD300 including dock and shipping) which I hope will last me for the next decade.
    - rrdharan 5y ago
      > Last year I splurged on a PinePhone (around AUD300 including dock and shipping) which I hope will last me for the next decade. I’m admittedly a pessimist but I’d personally be quite shocked if that happened. I simply lack faith that a small company can make a phone form factor device that can last / survive with that kind of lifetime. Building devices of this complexity that can actually last seems quite hard. Happy to be proven wrong!
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- jychang 5y ago
  You can buy a used SE (2020) for only about $150 and that'll probably be supported for another 4 years. I've spent more than that from shopping at Costco on an empty stomach (rookie mistake).
  - fouc 5y ago
    For Canada, it looks to be hard to acquire a used one for less than $250-280 CAD. So about $200-$220 USD. Still a solid choice. I find it hard to imagine there's any android phone that can beat this phone for the same price (used or not!), OS support, camera quality, speaker quality, CPU speed & task switching speed, overall responsiveness, etc.
    - Ourgon 5y ago
      Ability to install a free software distribution, side-load software, run a plethora of Linux apps through Termux, fix the screen if you happen to break it without the thing complaining about "non-genuine parts", build, run and distribute software for the device without needing to pay a third party for the privilege of doing so, hook the thing up to a keyboard and display to use it for real work, install a full firewall blocking outgoing as well as incoming traffic... Oh wait, those are all things you can not do with those iOS devices. Since these happen to be things I do it seems that iPhone won't be myPhone. Also, why don't these friggin' iOS devices support Ogg/Vorbis? I just added a transcoding option to Spodcast [1] to allow those poor souls using such devices to follow Spotify-hosted podcasts through RSS. None of my devices had any problems with Ogg/Vorbis but it turns out iOS simply does not support it. VLC on iOS does as do some other apps but those are not podcast players. Bad Apple. [1] https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast
      - mattl 5y ago
        I’ve yet to see anyone distributing music only in Ogg Vorbis save for some backdoored Spotify thing.
        5y ago
- gzer0 5y ago
  I am struggling to understand where you are coming from. Can you elaborate? The cheapest second-hand iPhone that runs the latest iOS 15.0+ is an iPhone SE 1st gen (2016). Current prices on eBay indicate a price of $70. There is not a single Android that has been supported for this long of a time.
  - mattl 5y ago
    You can run iOS 15 on an iPhone SE (2016). They're very cheap to pick up. Around $70.
    - gzer0 5y ago
      Ahh my mistake, you're right. [1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe3fa5df43/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      That’s my “low-end” test device. I run iOS 14 on it. Cost me about $100.
    - jamesy0ung 5y ago
      Yep, I'm still using mine as my daily driver.
  - neurostimulant 5y ago
    Second-hand iphones are expensive in asia. For example, that second-hand iphone SE 2020 you mentioned cost ~$350 here. That's more expensive than some locally-produced mid-range android phones.
    - exikyut 5y ago
      Wow, I'm very curious as to why! Is it because they're imported, or because the asia-side emphasis is on export? This also makes me wonder what the price dropoff across models is compared to the worldwide average. Is every model "oh wow" more expensive, or is there a gradient upward trend that tapers off the closer you get toward the iPhone 13 end?
- wutwut5521 5y ago
  When I did iOS dev I could get by okay with an ipod touch, since I did not need cell or GPS testing. These are $200 new, $150 refurbed for the prev edition. The other route to go is a device farm service, IIRC AWS offers this nowadays.
- red369 5y ago
  Did you include low storage (e.g. 16GB) iPhone 6S and SE 2016 in your search? I’m mostly just curious whether your primary phones generally cost less than those. It would be hard to find much for cheaper than those where I am. Unrelated, but I find it interesting that storage size seems to affect second hand value so strongly. I mean that it looks like doubling would cost more than a few generations newer.
- asddubs 5y ago
  i bought an iphone 6s for this purpose for 50€. upon mentioning this to somebody i was also given a second one with a crap battery for free
- beagle3 5y ago
  That’s an iPhone 6S; I’ve seen them go for $100, or less with stuff like “battery runs out in 3 mins so must be connected to charger” which should be sufficient if you just develop.
paulpauper 5y ago
buying an iphone means it's still in the apple ecosystem. the problem is not the money but the hassle of having to buy it
- scarface74 5y ago
  So you don’t want to be in the Apple ecosystem. But you want to develop for an Apple product? How will you support the product when users encounter bugs?
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    I have had to support clients iOS apps and absolutely want nothing to do with the Apple eco system. We created dev accounts and bought a physical iPhone for the devs which we shared amongst everyon. An emulator would have been perfect in fact.
svnpenn 5y ago
Meanwhile, Android Studio is free and open source: https://developer.android.com/studio https://developer.android.com/studio
- chayleaf 5y ago
  it's a pain to build so everyone uses google's prebuilt binaries - which are non-free
amarshall 5y ago
The project makes it not super-obvious, but it’s just KVM underneath. Also it’s likely against the EULA to run on non-Apple hardware.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  If the software can’t tell the difference, does it matter? And if the EULA is unenforceable in your jurisdiction, does it matter?
  - amarshall 5y ago
    To the first: yes, because that doesn’t suddenly make it legal, just less likely to be found out. To the second: I mean, if the EULA doesn’t matter then it doesn’t matter.

chrismorgan 5y ago

The cheapest second hand iPhones that run the current version of iOS (but are right at the tail of any support) are on the high side of the price range of what I’ve ever spent on a new, primary phone that I expect to last me at least several years. (And although it’s not as common as the alternative, I’m hardly alone in not spending much on phones; now laptops, on the other hand—.) I don’t want to spend more on a device that I might use once every few months.

jjcon 5y ago
If you don't daily drive an iPhone and you don't want to buy into Apples ecosystem, why do you want to develop for their ecosystem (which of course requires $100 a year to do so)? Genuinely curious cause I see a lot of people with this sentiment, is it for work related purposes or something? Or testing of web work potentially?
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  For myself, it’s mostly web stuff with Safari and Safari on iOS that I’d really like to be able to test from time to time.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    Then macOS + Xcode + simulator would probably be the most cost-effective solution. *(Small glance at QEMU)*
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      Yeah, because I can’t use macOS without violating its EULA or forking out even more hundreds of dollars for a Mac Mini. :-(
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    There's a ton of companies out there who have real iPhones, iPads etc you can rent by the minute through a web browser to test your code or web sites. i.e. https://www.browserstack.com/test-on-iphone https://www.browserstack.com/test-on-iphone I'm just trying to find the one I use to test my emoji stuff, since Safari is the only one that displays emoji domains correctly.
    - simion314 5y ago
      Browser stack did not had the betas or the just released Safari versions, we had to depend on someone in our team risking upgrading to latest OSX to be able to debug with just released Safari that broke WebGL on desktop too. We do not target mobile users, we are fixing any bugs reported for Safari that are our code , but we only daily test with Firefox and Chrome because the developers and testers are using Windows or Linux(the team is in Europe)
- gman83 5y ago
  I have some sideproject apps that I built with Flutter that I use on my Android phone, and I would make them available on iOS if I didn't have to pay any money to do so.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    So the question is why would I as a consumer want to buy a least common denominator app using a cross platform framework that wasn’t actually tested on real hardware?
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      You can always uninstall it if it's crap right? It would be available to you as a choice, and now it's simply not available.
      - kitsunesoba 5y ago
        If the App Store becomes full of “checkbox ports” it’s going to be even more difficult to navigate than it already is. Part of that is on Apple for not investing more in discovery, but copious numbers of low effort ports isn’t a good thing to have anyway. In the game world, bad ports of console games to PC and bad ports of games from any other platform to the Switch are one of the most consistent gripes — quite often the sentiment surrounding them is that they’d be better off not existing.
        borland 5y ago
        The app store has been full of "checkbox ports" since about 6 months after it launched
      - freedomben 5y ago
        You're showing your cards as an android person ;-) I agree with you, but nearly everyone on apple products will not. I get a (too me very perplexing) very similar respose when I ask things like, "why would it hurt people who want an Apple curated app store experience to allow a buried setting in the settings menu that allows sideloading for the few people who want that?"
mattl 5y ago
An iPhone SE 1st Generation can be had for around $70. What phones are you buying?
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  OK, I was looking at iPhone 6S, a glance at eBay Australia suggests they’re starting somewhere around AUD150. iPhone SE 1st generation looks to be starting at more like AUD120. I spent around AUD150 on each of my first two phones. Last year I splurged on a PinePhone (around AUD300 including dock and shipping) which I hope will last me for the next decade.
  - rrdharan 5y ago
    > Last year I splurged on a PinePhone (around AUD300 including dock and shipping) which I hope will last me for the next decade. I’m admittedly a pessimist but I’d personally be quite shocked if that happened. I simply lack faith that a small company can make a phone form factor device that can last / survive with that kind of lifetime. Building devices of this complexity that can actually last seems quite hard. Happy to be proven wrong!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jychang 5y ago
You can buy a used SE (2020) for only about $150 and that'll probably be supported for another 4 years. I've spent more than that from shopping at Costco on an empty stomach (rookie mistake).
- fouc 5y ago
  For Canada, it looks to be hard to acquire a used one for less than $250-280 CAD. So about $200-$220 USD. Still a solid choice. I find it hard to imagine there's any android phone that can beat this phone for the same price (used or not!), OS support, camera quality, speaker quality, CPU speed & task switching speed, overall responsiveness, etc.
  - Ourgon 5y ago
    Ability to install a free software distribution, side-load software, run a plethora of Linux apps through Termux, fix the screen if you happen to break it without the thing complaining about "non-genuine parts", build, run and distribute software for the device without needing to pay a third party for the privilege of doing so, hook the thing up to a keyboard and display to use it for real work, install a full firewall blocking outgoing as well as incoming traffic... Oh wait, those are all things you can not do with those iOS devices. Since these happen to be things I do it seems that iPhone won't be myPhone. Also, why don't these friggin' iOS devices support Ogg/Vorbis? I just added a transcoding option to Spodcast [1] to allow those poor souls using such devices to follow Spotify-hosted podcasts through RSS. None of my devices had any problems with Ogg/Vorbis but it turns out iOS simply does not support it. VLC on iOS does as do some other apps but those are not podcast players. Bad Apple. [1] https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast
    - mattl 5y ago
      I’ve yet to see anyone distributing music only in Ogg Vorbis save for some backdoored Spotify thing.
      - 5y ago
gzer0 5y ago
I am struggling to understand where you are coming from. Can you elaborate? The cheapest second-hand iPhone that runs the latest iOS 15.0+ is an iPhone SE 1st gen (2016). Current prices on eBay indicate a price of $70. There is not a single Android that has been supported for this long of a time.
- mattl 5y ago
  You can run iOS 15 on an iPhone SE (2016). They're very cheap to pick up. Around $70.
  - gzer0 5y ago
    Ahh my mistake, you're right. [1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe3fa5df43/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    That’s my “low-end” test device. I run iOS 14 on it. Cost me about $100.
  - jamesy0ung 5y ago
    Yep, I'm still using mine as my daily driver.
- neurostimulant 5y ago
  Second-hand iphones are expensive in asia. For example, that second-hand iphone SE 2020 you mentioned cost ~$350 here. That's more expensive than some locally-produced mid-range android phones.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    Wow, I'm very curious as to why! Is it because they're imported, or because the asia-side emphasis is on export? This also makes me wonder what the price dropoff across models is compared to the worldwide average. Is every model "oh wow" more expensive, or is there a gradient upward trend that tapers off the closer you get toward the iPhone 13 end?
wutwut5521 5y ago
When I did iOS dev I could get by okay with an ipod touch, since I did not need cell or GPS testing. These are $200 new, $150 refurbed for the prev edition. The other route to go is a device farm service, IIRC AWS offers this nowadays.
red369 5y ago
Did you include low storage (e.g. 16GB) iPhone 6S and SE 2016 in your search? I’m mostly just curious whether your primary phones generally cost less than those. It would be hard to find much for cheaper than those where I am. Unrelated, but I find it interesting that storage size seems to affect second hand value so strongly. I mean that it looks like doubling would cost more than a few generations newer.
asddubs 5y ago
i bought an iphone 6s for this purpose for 50€. upon mentioning this to somebody i was also given a second one with a crap battery for free
beagle3 5y ago
That’s an iPhone 6S; I’ve seen them go for $100, or less with stuff like “battery runs out in 3 mins so must be connected to charger” which should be sufficient if you just develop.

paulpauper 5y ago

buying an iphone means it's still in the apple ecosystem. the problem is not the money but the hassle of having to buy it

scarface74 5y ago
So you don’t want to be in the Apple ecosystem. But you want to develop for an Apple product? How will you support the product when users encounter bugs?
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  I have had to support clients iOS apps and absolutely want nothing to do with the Apple eco system. We created dev accounts and bought a physical iPhone for the devs which we shared amongst everyon. An emulator would have been perfect in fact.

svnpenn 5y ago

Meanwhile, Android Studio is free and open source: https://developer.android.com/studio https://developer.android.com/studio

chayleaf 5y ago
it's a pain to build so everyone uses google's prebuilt binaries - which are non-free

amarshall 5y ago

The project makes it not super-obvious, but it’s just KVM underneath. Also it’s likely against the EULA to run on non-Apple hardware.

withinboredom 5y ago
If the software can’t tell the difference, does it matter? And if the EULA is unenforceable in your jurisdiction, does it matter?
- amarshall 5y ago
  To the first: yes, because that doesn’t suddenly make it legal, just less likely to be found out. To the second: I mean, if the EULA doesn’t matter then it doesn’t matter.