I've been developing a fairly popular macOS app for years. I consider myself in the community for that reason.

Apple has bundled everything together in a big mess.

- Only certain macOS versions can run certain XCode versions

- Only certain XCode versions contain certain SDK versions

- XCode embeds "Command line tools" which contains things like gcc, ruby, python, installed as a package, and conflicting with other versions on the machine

- Interface Builder is built into XCode and has its own compatibility story

It's a big messy blob and you can't pick-and-choose parts. You have to update your whole machine to move to the latest OS so they will let you run the latest XCode, so your app can compile on the latest platform for your users. It's not the best experience for sure. Many ecosystems have SDKs that you can download as you wish. I don't need to update my OS to download a version of the JDK for example.

That being all said, if you require users to download XCode, regardless of which part of it is necessary, i don't think you should mention "XCode free experience" or "XCode replacement".

I'm already developing a macOS app without launching the XCode GUI. I use the xcodebuild CLI that ships with XCode. My IDE is AppCode. I also use xcodebuild on CI to build the app headless. I would never call that a XCode free experience though, as i suffer from all the issues i mentionned above with version upgrades and XCode issues

I'm not too familiar with the xcode dev environment; could Theos be used instead of the huge xcode bundle? As far as I know, it provides the compilers and frameworks directly.

I looked into streaming but afaict the XIP format doesn’t support random access the same way that ZIP does. specifically because 1) it doesn’t seem to have a Central Directory like ZIP and 2) it has an optimization where files can be hardlinks to other files (by ID) in the XIP, so if you want to extract a file but all you get is a hardlink ID, you can’t expand the contents until you encounter and expand the hardlink pointee. it’s possible I’ve missed something, open to ideas for sure.

There are some components that may be downloadable separately but they really are part of Xcode. One ring to rule them all.

But that's wrong. You don't need macOS. That's why they say "cross-platform Xcode replacement". You just need the SDK, which can be used on every platform.

JetBrains already announced it is no longer targeting Fleet as its iOS strategy for Kotlin Multiplatform. Instead it will be realizing its strategy through IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio.

They’re still rejecting Fortnite so I don’t think they’re particularly scared of anything

A long while ago, they put some company selling hackintoshes straight into the ground. Nobody tried since

Apple has killed the Hackintosh…. It’s just bleeding out still.

Same thing with the bank bail out, if Bush did oh my we will never hear end of it, but if cool president who smokes weed and get down some good music, then no one really call him out on it.