It's so nice to be able to have any CI build your Android apps and Travis CI supports building iOS apps, too.
VSTS has hosted build servers for Windows, IOS, Linux, and Android.
It's even nicer not to have to maintain servers at all.
I try to avoid maintaining servers. We are moving to serverless functions with Lambda and serverless Docker with AWS Fargate.
Besides my stay at research institutes, I never worked on companies where IT allowed anything other than Windows as development machines.
Linux when required is only VM based or servers accessed via ssh.
Macs are only allowed on macOS/iOS related projects.
Docker remains a buzzword for the majority of customers, another box to tick besides big data and ML on slideware.
You also wouldn't have to buy Windows computers - you could either buy Windows + Parallels or spend about $60 a month and get a hosted Windows desktop on AWS.
You can get a hosted build server via Visual Studio Online - unlimited private git repos, 5 users free (each additional user $5). 240 build minutes free per month or $40 per hosted build agent with unlimited minutes.
If you really have no need for Windows machines, just use AWS Workspaces and you can get a 4 vcpu 16GB Hosted Windows workstation for $70 a month.
> An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects. For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to five users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
