Pierre-Marie here. The author of this toolchain.
Since 2011 this build environment has enabled thousands of people to build, deploy and distribute iOS and macOS apps (and even for some on not-officially-supported other Apple platforms), at the cost of an excruciating effort from me.
I have never attempted to hide it. I have never sought to draw people away from the Apple ecosystem, which I used to like a lot. I have never sought to earn a lot of money with this (hint: and I did not), neither did I seek to prevent other people from earning any. All my work always happened in plain sight ; the only thing I did not do, for philosophical reasons, was to advertise commercially for this product. I wanted to see if it could survive on word of mouth only - and it did.
For all these years, Apple knew about it. I have been contacted by Apple employees, even by a then top engineer (namely Nat Brown, who left Apple since, seemingly in disagreement with their policies) who wanted to know if we could collaborate somehow and exchange ideas to improve the Apple app production workflow.
For all these years, I strived to provide support to everybody's request, sometimes by the minute, and to provide constant patches for new features, undocumented protocol changes, and iOS/macOS technological evolutions.
I believe the apex of popularity of this toolchain was around 2020. Then, companies with a lot of backing money started to advertise about "cloud build" solutions, and started to herd people there. Consequently, the popularity and visibility of alternate toolchains such as this one started to decay progressively.
Just a few days ago, Apple decided to tighten the screws and stop accepting on the App Store apps that have been compiled with another toolchain than their Xcode, and made consequent technical changes to ensure this restriction would not easily be bypassed.
This sword of Damocles was hovering over our heads for a long time (since 2011 and the first version of this toolchain, actually). Perhaps I was accustomed to that continuously protracted threat, believing that if Apple employees themselves were using my tools internally, they wouldn't dare shut the door completely.
But we live in a world where everything is possible : they did.
Everything is possible in this brave new world indeed. I wouldn't be surprised that the most amazing things happen in the years to come (fasten your seatbelts, it won't be pretty).
As for me, I call it quits.
Also because I have taken a new dayjob since February this year, that simply doesn't leave me the material time I need to continue the race. I can't chase Apple's continuous changes to Xcode, iOS, macOS, the App Store, and Microsoft's changes altogether to continue delivering a product that reconciles these development platforms successfully. It is time to admit that the current feature state of this toolchain will only get worse and worse over time.
And I can't honestly let people continue to download a toolchain that I'm no longer able to support, and that can no longer represent a viable, long or even medium-term solution to their problems.
For this reason I have chosen to deprecate the asset on Unity's Asset Store.
Yes, there won't be any more updates.
I am sorry for those who bought the asset recently on the Asset Store, but Apple's decision to shut the door was something I had not anticipated. My mistake. Should these people request a refund, please contact me.
The source code of my work will not go public, to prevent dishonest people (there are some...) from setting up all sorts of paid services with it with minimal effort (I've seen this happen already, and it's not because I never did something that I'm okay with giving people the possibility of doing it).
That is not to say it will remain unavailable. If a *serious* company (one that doesn't have it already) is interested in it, they can acquire it from me. Terms and conditions to be discussed privately.
@Epic Games, and especially the people at RAD: thank you immensely for our cooperation and your support. I won't say more. Contact me again if you want the "latest and greatest".
End of the miracle. Wishing all the best to everybody.
Pierre-Marie Baty