I am about to embark on some mobile development projects but I’m doing a little homework first. My primary goal is to deploy to Android and iOS, but the latter is posing some problems because I do not have access to (nor do I have any interested in acquiring) a Mac.
Phonegap offers a cloud service where you can upload your mobile development project and they will do the building for you – no Mac required. From the Phonegap Build FAQ:
Simply upload your web assets – a ZIP file of HTML, CSS and
JavaScript, or a single index.html file – to PhoneGap Build, point us
to your Git or SVN repository, or let us set up a git remote endpoint
that you can push to. Then we’ll undertake the compilation and
packaging for you. In minutes, you’ll receive the download URLs for
all mobile platforms.
I am leaning toward the development and native UI capabilities of Appcelerator, but since I do not have a Mac, is there any hope for me using Titanium for iOS development using something akin to PhoneGap’s Build service?
If you dont have a Mac you will not be able to develop, test, deploy, or put in the app store applications for iOS, with or without using Titanium.
Regardless, even if you were able to use a cloud build technology with Titanium (which does not exist) you wont be able to deploy your final application to the App Store because you have to have XCode for that, the same goes for PhoneGap. Check this here:
Bottom line, unless you use a mac, your not legally deploying to the App Store.