Build iOS Apps In Xamarin Studio Using Windows PC

It has long been a dream of many mobile app developers to build apps that target all the platforms i.e. Android, Windows, and iPhone. The developers have to use different development platforms to develop different apps, like -  Android Studio, Visual Studio, and Swift/Objective C in Mac OS. To our surprise, now, multi-platform app development is possible using a single Windows PC with C# language.

Yes, you can build cross-mobile applications in Xamarin Studio, using a Windows machine. Xamarin Studio is now available for free to everyone since Microsoft has acquired it. People are much more familiar with building Android and Windows apps using C#. In this post, I’ll be discussing how you can setup a Mac environment in your Windows PC and take the advantage of C# language to build iOS apps.

Pre-requisite to set up Mac OS in your Windows machine

• A Windows machine with minimum 8 GBs of RAM.
• A minimum of 40 GB hard disk space; I prefer to use SSD for better performance.
• Mac OS El Capitan 10.11.6
• VMware player 12.0 or higher

Let's start

1. Download Mac OS from this link. Make sure that you download VMware image.
   
   
   
   
2. Download VMware player from the this link .
3. Reboot your PC, go to boot menu, and enable Virtualization Technology there (it should be under CPU configuration).
4. After enabling virtualization, restart your PC and install VMWare on it. Make sure to use it for free, non-commercial use if you cannot afford it.
5. Extract .rar folder of your MAC OS to the folder that you have reserved for it.
6. Now, open the extracted folder, go to Unlocker-> Unlocker2.0.8. In this folder, you must see win-install.cmd. Run this .cmd file as a system administrator. It will execute some commands in cmd and close automatically.
   
   
   
7. Now, open VMWare, click on “Open a virtual machine”, and give it a path to your OS X 10.11 El Capitan.vmx file which comes with the OS you just downloaded. Select this file.
   
   
   
   
8. Click on "Edit Virtual Machine Settings" in VMWare. If you have 8 GB of RAM, make sure to allocate it minimum 4 GB. On processors tab, you will get a clear idea of what to do here. You know better how many cores/ processors do you have in your PC. I have 4 processors in mine and allocated 2 processors to this Virtual Machine. After this, configure all settings here which depend on the specifications of your PC.
   
   
   
   
9. After configuring all the settings, you can click on play Virtual Machine. Your macOS will start now.
   
   
   
   
10. Language of macOS might be set to a language other than English. I suggest to watch a video on YouTube to change the language in your macOS.
    
    
11. Create an Apple account and provide all the details in Apple App Store. Download XCode (4.43 GB) from there. If it asks for administrator password, enter 123 in the password textbox.
    
    
    
    
12. After XCode is installed, go to xamarin.com, login with your credentials, and install Xamarin Studio for Mac on your macOS. After it is installed, you are ready to build your iOS iPhone apps.
    
    
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