For development these days you can find a used/refurb M1 Air or mini that will do the job just fine for less than half the stated price.
As for 2FA they support FIDO keys and passkeys just fine.
You can load images that represent Android devices in the Android Simulator and reproduce bugs that exist on the device.
I work with both and the Android simulation allows you to go further - which is good since the diversity of devices is bigger.
Both still sucks in the end and you should test on a real device. This is particularly painful because usually the devices you don't use frequently you simply don't charge, so you kinda want to prepare to charge the devices before. You can still plug and run the app while charging but it may give a throttled experience - which when profiling games may slight alter the results (a flashdrive read bottleneck may disappear when comparing to CPU one).
Some exceptions exist, like medical apps or apps that rely a lot on continuous operation (I recently worked on an OBD app that allows drivers to gather their trip data, and it needed to continuously run in the background - you wouldn’t believe how hard Android manufacturers make this).
Guess you've been lucky. Congrats!
> For development these days you can find a used/refurb M1 Air or mini that will do the job just fine for less than half the stated price.
Okay? So you still need to buy an extra general purpose computer just to be able to build for a phone? And this is somehow okay because you can "just" buy a refurbished one?
> As for 2FA they support FIDO keys and passkeys just fine.
Nope. Unless this is a very recent change which they haven't even documented yet. https://developer.apple.com/support/authentication/
Xcode, etc are heavily reliant on macOS and would not be easy to port. Xcode itself is Swift+ObjC+AppKit and the simulators just run the iOS userland atop the shared bits between iOS and macOS. This means that a port entails porting all of AppKit or starting a whole new “Xcode for other platforms” codebase to run parallel with original Xcode as well as writing a full on iOS virtualizer for other platforms. Possible, but expensive with questionable ROI.
Apple definitely supports FIDO keys because I’ve been using YubiKeys to log into my developer account for a while now.
This is not my experience. We've had reviewers say "app doesn't work well on new (phone model)". When asking for clarification we were told we had to test on a real device. At that point you can either give in, or try getting more info out of the reviewer which is like pulling teeth and will take weeks.
> Xcode, etc are heavily reliant on macOS and would not be easy to port. Xcode itself is Swift+ObjC+AppKit and the simulators just run the iOS userland atop the shared bits between iOS and macOS. This means that a port entails porting all of AppKit or starting a whole new “Xcode for other platforms” codebase to run parallel with original Xcode as well as writing a full on iOS virtualizer for other platforms. Possible, but expensive with questionable ROI.
Okay, and? The entire point is that they're a greedy bigcorp and want money, so yeah. Of course they'll make everyone else bend over backwards so they can rake in the cash.
> Apple definitely supports FIDO keys because I’ve been using YubiKeys to log into my developer account for a while now.
Where is this documented? I don't see anything about this on https://developer.apple.com/support/authentication/
Can you do this without ever associating an iDevice? I can't check because I've sadly already done so and would need to spend $$$ again on a new account, which I don't feel like doing just to prove a point. Please keep in mind this is about an "Account Holder" Apple Developer Account.
