So I discovered that Firebase actually does work in my development environment, which surprised me. Now how do I test my fallback? I have to find a device that won’t work with Firebase. How about an iPhone! Well I don’t have an iPhone. An iPhone simulator? The only mac I have is this ancient Mac Mini that I have turned into an Ubuntu server. Even if I reinstalled Snow Leopard on this Mac Mini, there’s no way I am running an iPhone simulator on that thing. iPhones barely existed back then. I’m not going to go out and buy a new Mac just for the iPhone simulator. So… Hackintosh! I have tried this several times in the past with no success. But I decide to give it one more go over my Christmas vacation.
I start with my Snow Leopard cd and some instructions from tonymacx86.com. I manage to make a VirtualBox virtual machine running Snow Leopard! This is exciting. I can’t get any farther than Snow Leopard in the VM, though, so I have to go around the house and start taking apart computers. My son’s HP seems to be the friendliest to this endeavor, so I swap hard drives with the Ubuntu machine that I use as a TV so I won’t ruin his Minecraft setup. I get Snow Leopard running on that, and then upgrade it to El Capitan, and then Catalina. Success! I still have to start the thing with a USB stick, but it seems to work. I haven’t tried developing on it yet, because getting to Catalina took up the entire winter break. It was not easy, and involved many failed attempts. It was pretty thrilling when I finally got it working though.
Hackintosh is a funny thing. Apple would have you think it was illegal to do such a thing, and perhaps it is. But if Apple really did not want this to happen, how hard would it really be to shut it down? The operating system knows what hardware it’s on. It could just refuse to run on anything but Apple hardware. Are we supposed to believe that instead of just shutting that door, Apple would rather let everyone loose and then run around trying to prosecute them? It doesn’t make any sense. I think Apple is perfectly content to let people like myself, who wouldn’t touch their products at all save for Hackintosh, have their harmless fun. I’m certainly not making any money off of it.