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Xcode Cloud overview
- fellellor 4y agoDo people find it hard to run Xcode on their MacBook Air? Who is this service targeted to? I’m asking because I don’t know.
- mrweasel 4y agoBusinesses? I'm thinking it's something a team of developers would use. There are a ton of project on GitHub that uses various CI/CD tools to build package, rather than letting a random developer build an distribute a new release. Similarly a company might want to use this to test, build and release software. Checking that patches and updates from any number of developers can be merged and verify that all tests still passes. If I understand it correctly, it would also mean that use Xcode Cloud to release an application into the App Store. Then no single developer needs access to submit new versions.
- fellellor 4y agoYeah this makes sense.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoSay you have a 6 or more developer team working on an app. Do you really want everyone to be able to create production builds? Or do you really want to rely on one guy having the production certificates? What if you've outsourced your app development; do you really want random developers spread across the world from having the ability to make production builds? Anyway, there's more authorative sources on the internet about "why CI" than some guy (me) in a comment section.
- fellellor 4y agoOh I thought this was for individuals for some reason.
- nikanj 4y agoDoes this mean one can reasonably develop ios apps without a mac?
- pooper 4y agoSadly, no. > Xcode Cloud is a continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode and designed expressly for Apple developers. It accelerates the development and delivery of high-quality apps by bringing together cloud-based tools that help you build apps, run automated tests in parallel, deliver apps to testers, and view and manage user feedback. This requires xcode, which requires a Mac as far as I know.
- obenn 4y agoYou still need a Mac with Xcode
- data-ottawa 4y agoNo, this lets you do automated tests and builds in the cloud. You’ll still need Xcode to create the project, sign it, manage entitlements, load to test flight, etc.
- DelightOne 4y ago> load to test flight The web page says it supports test flight.
- MBCook 4y agoXcode cloud requires you let Apple handle code signing automatically so you don’t have to do it locally, although obviously you still have to have a paid account. Additionally as others have mentioned this can push things to TestFlight for you.
- paxys 4y agoThis is just a CI/CD product. You still need a Mac and the Xcode desktop app.
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- homarp 4y agosee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32654493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32654493 "[author] has been using Xcode Cloud to compile and deploy my rcmd app switcher (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd) for the past few months, and it’s been a great experience. I liked that with a single “git push” I could compile, archive, deploy to TestFlight, and send for beta review. I even pushed a fix from my iPhone using Working Copy one time while I was on a train. These are the pricing plans for those interested: - 25 compute hours/month: Free* - 100 compute hours/month: $49.99/month - 250 compute hours/month: $99.99/month - 1000 compute hours/month: $399.99/month * Free through December 2023, then $14.99/month if you choose to subscribe at that time. "
- Maursault 4y ago> 1000 compute hours/month: $399.99/month This is interesting, because a month never contains more than 744 hours, so even if you owned your own hardware, you couldn't beat Apple's compute power with only one machine.
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- m3kw9 4y ago25$ or compute hours free a month, I wonder how much tests that is, and any overhead cpu costs?
- codazoda 4y ago3. Free through December 2023, then US$14.99 per month if you choose to subscribe at that time.
- akmarinov 4y agoFor comparison Bitrise charges 3 tokens per minute on an M1 mac and 10 000 tokens are $500. That gives you 55 hours.
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- wetpaws 4y agoBitrise does a lot more than just iOS cicd
- akmarinov 4y agoNot on an M1 Mac, they don't
- smoldesu 4y agoSo... let's pop the champagne for the 1,000 Billion dollar business finally engineering a cheaper way to deliver their own software?
- spiderice 4y agoI think you must have misread GP's comment. They said "for comparison", and I think you read "let's pop the champagne". I for one found the comparison appropriate and interesting.
- keyle 4y agoCough cough, sarcastic old dev here "yeah, that's what XCode needed, cloud CI/CD".
- Apocryphon 4y agoFinally, the fruits of the Buddybuild acquisition(?)
- alberth 4y agoDumb question: why does a cloud offering require onprem macOS? Shouldn’t folks on iOS at least be able to access XCode Cloud
- jbverschoor 4y agoBecause of licensing.
- MBCook 4y agoXcode Cloud is a CI/CD setup for compiling and signing Mac and iOS apps. It is not a web or remote development environment like some other companies offer. Because it can be triggered by pushes into git, you could make changes to existing code from an iPad or PC and get it built. But you can’t (realistically) do anything that requires Xcode such as adding new things to your project or messing with xib files.
- derefr 4y agoIt’s a CI system with XCode as its fat client. There’s no XCode for iOS.
- danpalmer 4y agoThere isn't an Xcode for iOS, but there is an increasingly capable iOS development environment for iOS, and I expect that this cloud offering is intended to eventually complement that well. Much of the stuff that Xcode Cloud does is automation that's ~easy with a terminal and some scripting and that many developers end up doing on their Macs, but that is hard to do in the limited computing environment that iOS offers – things like packaging apps for TestFlight with the right signing keys, compressing images, etc. By moving those processes to automation running in the cloud, Apple are making iOS development on iOS more feasible.
- jbverschoor 4y agoThe first steps to Apple’s AWS competitor. Their multi billion contract with Amazon will end soon, so the timing makes perfect sense.
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- Aloha 4y agoHow does a CI/CD system lead to an AWS competitor?
- altairprime 4y agoThe pricing is in compute hours, which means that their app-integrated CI/CD offering directly competes with offerings that require you to purchase your own retail-rate AWS EC2 &co compute hours.
- dwaite 4y agoThey are likely pricing in compute hours because their upstream providers also bill in compute-hours. The lack of an ongoing free tier also softly implies that they are being charged upstream.
- jasoncartwright 4y agoIs that true? Have they been investing the required billions (tens of billions?) in datacenter infrastructure across the globe to do this?
- jbverschoor 4y agoThey have built a few datacenters around the globe. They’re spending 10B between 2018 and 2023 to build datacenters in the US. They’ve been a big customer on all cloud platforms (learning). The last contract with aws is worth at least 1.5b (300m/year but growing since 2018) and ends in about 1.5 year. Seems like a good place to save billions, and make some more by offering cloud services on efficient systems. And they've been hiring a lot of infra people since 2020
- frizlab 4y agoIt’s a small c in Xcode…
- monocularvision 4y agoYes, can we get the title updated to fix my twitching eye?
- sebastien_b 4y agoAlso I wonder why they never pronounced it “Ten-Code” (after all “Mac OS X” was “Mac oh-ess Ten”)
- eyelidlessness 4y agoFor that matter it should’ve been renamed 11code alongside the release of macOS 11!
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
- eyelidlessness 4y agoWhoever flagged my adjacent comment, “applaud” means praise. I applaud the person who downvoted my bad joke. I was sincerely agreeing with the downvote of my own comment, not objecting to the downvote. I will however object to being moderated for agreeing with being moderated.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
- BonoboIO 4y agoYou can get a Mac Mini M1 as Server for as low as 49$ per month from hetzner. If you need more CI „hours“ this is a good way to go. For signing and the workflows a base subscription is maybe a good deal. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/brands/matrix-apple/?country=ot https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/brands/matrix-a... Those parallel Test will get through your hours very quickly.
- novok 4y agoAnd then you need to spend all of that time managing that machine for a lot of labor cost. It's all about a balance overall.
- 10000truths 4y agoManaging what, exactly? I get that there’s a one time cost you have to pay to set things up, but that’s true of cloud builds as well.
- MBCook 4y agoSoftware updates, for one.
- chaxor 4y agoI'm confused, if you're running an M2 Mac, you're probably going to be running Asahi Linux. (Not really sure there is any other option :P) That would be set up on the first day with the simple asahilinux she'll script, and then theres essentially nothing else needed after that. So you should be able to just `pacman -Syu`
- arianvanp 4y agoIf you run Asahi Linux you won't be able to do your XCode build so that kind of seems to defeat the whole purpose.
- 4y ago
- solarkraft 4y agoI do wonder how they're implementing this. Are they also building Mac Mini farms or are they making exemptions from their ToS for themselves like so often to get around that and be able to run their service more efficiently than their competitors? It feels like something that may or should be prevented by some laws.
- MBCook 4y agoMy understanding is Apple uses Linux a lot internally for server stuff. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was just Linux machines running LLVM and their other tools. Perhaps the stuff runs on MacOS in VMs for the best compatibility, but I’m not sure that’s strictly necessary.
- mrweasel 4y agoThe iPhone apps where already cross-compiled from AMD64, before the switch to the Apple Silicon. It might not take that much to do the compilation on an Linux server, regardless of the underlying hardware. There is something weird about a company that makes it's own hardware and operating system using something completely different in their datacenters. However I don't think that macOS have the tooling required to large scale installation required for something like this.
- pjmlp 4y agoOnce upon a time they did.
- BonoboIO 4y agoReally good question, I think someone will get their hands dirty and find a way to see on which hardware it’s running. Maybe through time correlation, that 2 test are running on the same hardware and reverse the power of the Hardware.
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- naikrovek 4y ago
- zackify 4y agoXcode cloud is terrible. Slow. Fails randomly with unknown error messages. Save yourself time and money with an M1 Mac mini as a GitHub actions self hosted runner. Pays for itself quickly, you can upload apps direct to App Store Connect from Xcode cli tools already.
- zionic 4y ago>Slow. Fails randomly with unknown error messages. I mean, that’s Xcode on your machine. Why would Xcode on someone else’s machine be any better?
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- JimDabell 4y agoIf you’re going to complain that Xcode Cloud is unreliable, it’s probably best not to suggest GitHub Actions as an alternative, it doesn’t have the best track record for reliability itself. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=github+down https://hn.algolia.com/?q=github+down
- password4321 4y agoAchieving an open-source implementation of Apple Code Signing and notarization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32386762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32386762