Building desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux

Besides mobile apps for Android and iOS, Delphi and FireMonkey offer you the ability to build native applications for the desktop, as we saw in the previous sections. While this book is focused on mobile, in this chapter I want to add some quick notes regarding the desktop platform, offering a bit of specific advice and steps to build applications for Windows, macOS, and even Linux (if you own the Enterprise edition of Delphi or RAD Studio). This won’t be a deep dive; I will only highlight some core considerations for Windows development.

We have built Windows applications in this chapter as well as previous chapters of this book. The reason is simple – the Delphi IDE runs on Windows, and it should be no surprise that Delphi offers the best platform support in terms of tooling for Windows. For all other platforms, Delphi has a cross-compiler, a compiler that runs on Windows and produces a binary for different operating...