You'll be able to run Objective-C based applications on Windows as long as they have the completed APIs for the bridge (the documentation shows a list of things not there yet). It's pretty neat! You won't be able to download an application directly off your iPhone and run it on Windows though (at least I don't think you'll be able to at any point) as you basically have to recompile using this tool.

In other words, this project is to CoreFoundation as winelib is to win32?

I think so but I haven't dug into it enough to say for certain. So I would defer to anyone else who's dug into it :)

They are also working on translating over Swift.

Most importantly, the ability to develop iOS applications on a Windows box.

This is a welcome sign for those that do not want to buy Apple hardware and have struggled working with Hackintosh VMs or cloud-based OSX desktops.

Is it still policy for Apple to require XCode and therefore force you into buying Apple hardware (one way or another) in order to deploy to the App Store?

Yes. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, you can't deploy an app to the app store without a Mac. But you can (at least in theory) do iOS development on a Windows machine.

Isn't it that you just need your build to be signed by a registered copy of XCode/OSX (don't know specifically what it is)?

So you can actually just send the code developed on your windows box off to a third party build server, which will be an actual registered mac - you get the compiled binary back and then submit that to the app store, no worries.

I'm not sure if the rules around this have changed but IIRC from a couple of years ago when I last checked, this is what Adobe were doing with their phonegap build server - you send them up your phonegap project which can be written on anything (windows, linux, etc), they compile it to apps for various platforms and send you back those binaries, you then just submit these to the various platform app stores. Again, IIRC, this included iOS apps.

You are correct, and if I remember clearly, I think this is how Xamarin does it as well.

There's always Cordova/PhoneGap and possibly Ionic Framework. It's much easier to build apps that look good on all different device sizes with hybrid tech. You'll want to use Visual Studio 2015 for that too since Microsoft now has an Android Emulator which is faster than any other.

Looking to the future, there's React Native.

If you don't want to buy Apple hardware, why are you bothering with iOS?

This here won't really help you do that. It's for bringing code written for iOS to a windows runtime.

You could do that before; see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22358/how-can-i-develop-... and https://maniacdev.com/2010/01/iphone-development-windows-opt...

Not really. You still need a Mac to sign the app, and a Mac to deploy to iOS hardware.

Makes it easier to port an iOS app to Windows.

Actually, Windows 10 - so if I understand it correctly this is about universal apps and as such would mean that if you port your app succesfully it would immediately run on all phones/desktops/tablets/whatever running Windows 10? If so it seems like this could be a major thing given the amount of complaints I read about the lack of apps for windows phones, i.e. in the long run if this works out then it's goodbye Android/iOS-only apps and welcome Android/iOS/Windows apps?

Though oddly enough, the beta version only works for x86/64 architectures. So not Windows Phones.

I don't know how odd that is. Windows 10 Mobile isn't released yet, and Windows 10 has been released. Nobody is going to DEVELOP these on Windows Mobile devices, so it still needs to work on Windows 10 for dev and testing. So developers can start working on using this now, and a later update will add phone support, so they can deploy there as well.

The Candy Crush app is claimed to be a ported iOS app, already available on Windows Phone 8. And I kinda thought the whole Universal Apps thing was architecture-independent.