Phonegap, phonegap build and iOS - need a Mac?

Question

firstly, I looked at previous similar questions, but their answers had either old or conflicting answers, so I ask, what are the current (May 14) requirements for creating / testing / deploying iPhone / iPad applications?

Longer version - the client was asked how to develop an application for iOS / Android, and as I was completely new for this, I was hoping to use PhoneGap to use my existing website skills for application development. Currently, I just own an Android phone, so I installed the Android SDK and PhoneGap on Ubuntu (everything loads this week, including Ubuntu, so all current versions) and eventually got a Hello World phoneGap example to run on the emulator and the actual phone (not through the game store, only a local copy of the APK file)

Ive found a lot of guides here and elsewhere, which details how you can publish to the App Store using a PC (or Ubuntu, I guess) - mostly certificates, etc. But from my experience creating my tools for creating my first world hello app, PhoneGap requires an SDK for each target device, so does it require the Apple SDK to let you run the emulator? Or can you imitate the iPhone on Ubuntu?

It seems to me that I even thought that you can deploy it to the App Store without a Mac, you need one during development to start the emulator - is this right or what am I missing?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Short answer: You do not need to have an iOS SDK on Ubuntu (and you cannot either). build.phonegap.com will take care of this for you. There seems to be no iOS emulators for Ubuntu, but there may be some online services that you can use. But I believe that you still need a Mac to publish to the app store.

Long answer:

You will need:

• Apple Developer Account for Certificate Files
• You probably need an iOS device for testing. There seems to be no iOS emulators for Ubuntu, although there may be some good online services. (Some good threads on this: 1 , 2 ). See the commentary on Kerri below, strongly recommending you a test on a real device, not an emulator.

Here's how you do it:

• Using your Apple Developer account, create a certificate and provisioning file in the "Certificates, Identifiers, and Profiles" section.
• Create a .p12 file from the certificate. (You should be able to use OpenSSL, but I'm not sure about the exact step.)
• Register an account with build.phonegap.com .
• Create a signature key using your .p12 and security files.
• Download your code and build.phonegap.com will create a .ipa file for you.
• If you use an iOS device for testing, you can view build.phonegap.com on the device and install the application from there.
• To publish in the app store, I believe that you still need a Mac with Xcode. (Perhaps there is a third-party service that does this, but I could not find it.) An alternative to buying a Mac is to buy only the OS and double boot or create a virtual machine.