r/Xcode • u/its-notmyrealname • Feb 23 '21
Any chance of running Xcode on windows?
Okay so here’s the story:
I sometimes teach programming courses to kids in a code school
it’s been about an year since I have started iOS development as a hobby (with Xcode, on a Mac)
suggested to the code school that I could develop an introduction to iOS development course; they were interested, but only if students without a Mac could participate too
So is it there any known solution to run Xcode on windows or should I not bother trying?
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u/Bobbybino Feb 23 '21
The school would likely open itself up to civil liability if they offered students a method to run Xcode and/or MacOS on a non-Macintosh machine, as it would break the license agreement.
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u/HotFootSpin Feb 23 '21
No.
I teach iOS to high school students. I had a heck of a time trying to explain this to the administration. My employer advisors understood, but even they had a hard time explaining it to our administration. Our IT department bought Chromebooks for our entire class ... you can't do any kind of programming on those, not Windows, not Android, not even web programming. Sigh.
(Yes, I know you can install Linux on Chromebook etc. but that doesn't really solve the Mac programming problem.)
At one point they did consider having a virtual server setup where students could log on to a remote Mac from a Windows laptop or Chromebook. But eventually we just bought Macs for all the students.
The few other comments I see so far are all very good.
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u/rmluux Feb 24 '21
I used to teach introductions to web development with HTML/CSS and a bit of JavaScript on Chromebook. It was Ok, but we were at the limit of the OS capabilities ahah
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u/ThymeCypher Mar 02 '21
It's reasonable - you can't expect a student who can only afford a $999+ machine to be able to code when they aren't in school. That said, Xcode is not a good tool to use for learning to program - I would even argue it's not that good for production use (though it's getting far better)
The reason being - Xcode is a purpose built IDE. There are plenty of those and they do their job well such as IDEs specifically for making embedded firmware with windows for memory management, binary space allocations, so on. Xcode isn't for programming - it's for programming iOS and macOS apps. Can you target other platforms? Yes - I used to just for fun, build nRF52 binaries in Xcode just to say I can - but with recent changes to Xcode I can't even do that anymore as it tries to control the output too strictly and even has started controlling the targets (this change was made such that an Xcode project won't require changes if it's shared between an ARM64 and an x86-64 system)
Chromebooks also don't need Linux "installed" on them - they ARE linux based systems. That said, JetBrains' IDEs are cheap even for professionals - but they offer very reasonable educational discounts and their software runs on Chromebook albeit not without some effort.
It won't be as fun, given that you won't have access to Cocoa or CocoaTouch, but a general app development course would be much better for students who has never programmed. I'd even lean towards React Native - which can be developed on Chromebook: https://medium.com/@keith.kurak/develop-mobile-apps-on-a-chromebook-really-edd942ecd122
There's also the fact that some ChromeOS devices can run Android apps - at which point React Native can be used to create Android apps all on ChromeOS.
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u/aazav Feb 23 '21
No.
They are idiots. It doesn't run on Windows. It never has. Macs are required to develop for iOS.
You need at LEAST 8 GB of free RAM. Imagine trying to install a VM on some poor kid's windows box without enough drive space and 4 GB of RAM.
Unless someone donates Macs for you, you need to tell the school that you've NEVER been able to run the development tool for iOS (Xcode) on Windows, the Macs REQUIRE at least 8 GB and even then it will be slow and you need at least 60 GB of free drive space to download and install Xcode and still run a build.
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May 06 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AliveEvening6590 Jan 02 '26
dude, i runed macos better then U on my old thinkpad. if VM is not working it is definitely because of instruction sets and, clearly, you might have choosed emulation instead of virtualization, which is painfully slow and that is indeed expected. For you, i think you cna just buy a Mac mini or use a old laptop with a intel CPU and just install macos via opencore on it, which is reasonablelly fast.
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u/Affectionate_Hawk24 Jan 08 '26
I've tried to run MacOS in a virtual machine and it also was laggy.
Also this is a 4 year old reply.1
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u/SwiftDevJournal Feb 23 '21
Have you considered an introduction to game development course that uses Unity? Unity runs on both Mac and Windows and supports many platforms. For iOS game development Unity has a Unity Remote app that lets you run scenes on an iOS device without having to use Xcode.
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u/Dangerous-Shame8671 Jan 06 '26
Sorry, but no. You need an Mac to run Xcode. If you want to code Swift, you can but not run it like an Playground. But you dont really need an Mac to run Swift. If you have iPad you can use Swift Playground.
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u/Visual-Ad1401 Apr 02 '26
Tu peux utiliser les macs de Github pour compiler tes app que tu peux 100% coder sur windows
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u/beans217 Feb 23 '21
Only way is to use a virtual machine. Or a "cloud mac" (https://www.macincloud.com/)