Why doesn't Unity build an IPA directly?

I know that Xcode is required to build for iOS, but why does Unity not use the Xcode command line tools (e.g. xcodebuild) to complete the process, rather than require the user to finish it?

It stands in contrast to the Android build process which can build an .apk with Gradle. It notably doesn't export a Gradle project and require me to build it - although that is an option.

Of course various 3rd party utilities exist to automate this, and it's not too difficult to call xcodebuild, but my question remains - why do the iOS and Android build processes vary so much in terms of how much is left to the developer?

I write this as someone who's been in the industry for 20 years but is relatively new to Unity so am still in "question everything" mode.

 

Trust me. You don't want Unity to build IPA.
You want it to export a project file to use native tools available for target platform.
The lack of exporting a project for macOS for example is a huge PITA.

I have a history with Unity since 3.0, I think, and any serious production would absolutely require you to build final executable with native target tools.

 

I should clarify. I want Unity to invoke the native tools, in particular xcodebuild.

 

The feature's in beta:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/mac-standalone-xcode-project-generation.680365/

 

I think this is a minor issue that can easily be done in BuildPostProcess with a few lines of code. It's much easier to implement it yourself than to wait for Unity to provide a solution. For example, we launch Code Signing shell script from BuildPostProcess when targeting macOS - took me an hour or so to write such post-processing behaviour.

 

That's great news!!! We are bound to 2018.4 though.

 

Yes I could write it myself, or use one of the available Asset Store solutions.

But I still don't understand why the Android and iOS build processes differ so much, and why there's no plan to align them.

 

Unreal does this.

It's a freakin' nightmare. It removes the ONE CHANCE you have to fix things, if the building app screws them up.