It's so sad Steve Jobs died of ligma...

So a little side project for me this month was to finally get stuck into properly porting Sileo to iOS, and I managed to score a cheap second-hand iPhone so I had some real hardware to test it on. 

...only to then find out Apple requires you to have a Mac to build packages!

Ren'Py is capable of compiling builds for every other platform internally, Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android, HTML5... all within the SDK. But for iOS? Not if Apple has anything to say about it! All Ren'Py can do here is spit out an xCode project, with xCode being software only available on Mac OS.

My next course of action involved virtual machines and hackintoshes. A few years back it was fairly easy to get Mac OS running this way and while it wasn't lightning fast, it would have been perfectly sufficient for our needs. Alas, running in a VM I found the newer versions of Mac OS unusually slow, and trying to run it directly on hardware was even worse - there were plenty of guides containing kexts and such required to have Mac OS boot on non-Apple hardware, and usually said download links were absent or dead. And even had I got it to run, the list of issues people experienced on the specific hardware I was trying to do it on was... well, not encouraging, to say the least.

So... guess who just ordered a brand new M2 Mac Mini.

It's funny. I can generate an Android build in seconds on just about any hardware under the sun. But Apple being Apple has to make everything a complete nightmare locked into their restrictive ecosystem. We're indie devs. We're not made of money. But if you want to develop for iOS, you pretty much have to be.

As a silver lining, once this horrible overpriced silver brick arrives, we'll have everything we need to start the process which we'll complete in stages. Stage one will be to build a full uncensored version of Sileo for iOS along with all the platform specific development and bug fixes required to make it run beautifully. We may make the .ipa files available to those willing to jump through Apple's ridiculous hoops to get it installed, and this will be a fully uncensored version of Sileo running natively on the hardware. Stage two will be to develop an SFW mode for Sileo which will be available as an option on all builds. Stage three will then be to pay apple more fucking money (;_;) and submit an SFW enforced version for approval on the App Store. I expect we'll hit two birds with one stone and push a similar version to the Play Store which literally charges a quarter of what apple does to publish apps... bet you didn't see that coming huh? Apple?! Being greedy?! Surely not!

The end result will hopefully be a more accessible way to play Sileo on iOS. It'll have all the juicy stuff cut obviously, Apple be puritanical like that, but we'll likely still be pushing uncensored .ipa's, and the HTML5 version does work on most iOS devices with a touch of jank, so that's always a compromise for those unwilling to take a reaming from Steve Job's ghost in order to get sideloading to happen. On that note, my testing on an iPhone SE 2020 showed some stutter when buttons were clicked and a very, very strange on-screen keyboard implementation, but otherwise had Sileo running well via browser with all the lewdness intact. I doubt we can do anything about those specific problems, especially considering that iOS is officially unsupported by Ren'Py web, but the fact it works as well as it does is a win in my books!

Anyway, I probably won't receive the Mac until next week, but as we make progress I'll keep you up to date on any notable progress. The SFW mode will likely be the most time consuming bit depending on how we approach it, but it's feasible that the .ipa's will be available sooner rather than later. 

And for those looking for a small progress report, work on 20x1 is going well so far. Slow and steady wins the race. I've admittedly spent way too much time trying to "no u" apple these last few days, but with the mac on it's way all I have is time in the interim, so I'm aiming to get 20x1 at least finished before that arrives. 

That's all for now. See you soon with more news!

PS: ligma balls