Rookie Question About Flutter Requirements

📚 Official Books Flutter Apprentice
1

I’m totally new to this and I’m betting that I simply have a misunderstanding here.

The first thing on the list of “Things I Need” is XCode for iOS development. But I can’t install it on my Windows PC or build iOS apps on Windows.

So this whole thing confused me right away. The whole selling point of Flutter is its cross-platform performance and not having to maintain two different apps.

How do I develop both Android and iOS if I can’t install/use iOS’s main development tool in the first place?

Surely I’m getting ahead of myself here but…am I expected to go out and buy a Mac?

2

Hi @droscoe. Flutter is designed to enable a developer to create cross-platform apps with a single codebase. Unfortunately, for some platforms you have to have the toolset for deploying to that platform; in this case iOS and macOS apps require developing on a Mac. Just as to run Windows apps one needs Windows.

For more details on platform requirements see the official Flutter docs at https://flutter.dev.

There are services that you can develop on virtual machines, but I can’t speak to the costs in doing this.