Comment by Nandan N on "Ask anything to Expo Team"

Nandan N

Compassionate Coder

Feb 19, 2018

Is it at all possible to build for iOS using a Windows machine in React Native (and Expo)? If not, is this something Expo could potentially target someday, or is it something that Apple will never allow?

James Ide

Working on Expo, a mobile platform to write native apps just once with JavaScript.

Feb 19, 2018

With Expo, you write just JavaScript and can develop on Windows as long as you have an iOS device as well. When you are ready to submit your app to the App Store, you can use the Expo standalone app build service to create an IPA, the file you submit to Apple.

Brent Vatne

Feb 19, 2018

Yes this is possible with Expo! The native builds run on our servers, so when you run exp build:ios it builds your JS bundle and asset manifest, uploads them both to CloudFront, then kicks off a build job on MacStadium. When it's done, you can download the binary and upload it to iTunes (it may be possible to upload without a Mac, I am not entirely sure). This is only needed when you're ready to ship to the App Store, and before that the workflow is no different between a Mac and Windows when using Expo. Read more about this in our docs: docs.expo.io/versions/latest/distribution/index.h…

Using React Native without Expo, you can't really build for iOS without some likely painstaking workarounds involving provisioning your own mac cloud instance.

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