Launching Application to iOS device from a Windows Environment

Development Platform & Builds Mobile
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Hi,

Our team is currently developing a UE4 application in windows, but we would like to deploy the application to windows, android, and iOS devices. Currently we have launched the application to windows and android devices successfully. I was following the set of instructions here

However, when I go to generate my iOS certificate, I follow the link provided in the documentation, and it appears that I must be an Apple Developer before I can complete this process. However, this costs $99 a year, and we do not intend to put this on the App Store. With android devices, we just had to enable usb debugging, and were able to launch to the device, but I could find nothing like this on our iOS device. Any suggestions of help would be greatly appreciated!

We are using Unreal Engine 4.9.2, developing on Windows, and trying to launch to an Ipad Air 2.

Thanks

2

So after some more in-depth googling, I discovered that if you are not developing using X-Code (which is only available for Mac users), you cannot launch your application to a iOS device without a certificate (At least I could find no free and legal options). I did find this site https://blog.udemy.com/xcode-on-windows/ which said I could download VirtualBox to simulate a Mac environment, and then download XCode, however, I would have to then re-download all of the Unreal Engine Source Code, and go through the process of properly building our application. Since no one on our team is familiar with Xcode, we did not know if there would be any other bugs, or unknown challenges in developing using Xcode. A team member did mention that they had device connection issues in the past with Virtual Box, and so our team then decided to instead purchase the Apple Development Program for $99 dollars to get the appropriate files to push to the iOS device. I wouldn’t mark this answer as resolved, because if there is a free option, our team would still love to hear it, and if someone does try the method mentioned above, please feel free to comment if it worked or not. If there is no free method to push to an iOS device developing in a windows environment, then please mark this answer as resolved.