5 ms·

Dumb question: why does a cloud offering require onprem macOS? Shouldn’t folks on iOS at least be able to access XCode Cloud

jbverschoor 4y ago
Because of licensing.
MBCook 4y ago
Xcode 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.
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  „Complaining“ :D
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Heh. Fixed.
derefr 4y ago
It’s a CI system with XCode as its fat client. There’s no XCode for iOS.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  There 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.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    You mean, there is (1) first-party children's sandbox that is being provided by Apple's good graces and private entitlements, written in their own language and only allowing you to publish applications to their heavily taxed storefront? Yeah. Sounds like Apple is starting to get serious about their developer market, huh?
    - danpalmer 4y ago
      I didn't say it was for everyone, or a general purpose development environment. iOS developers have been asking to be able to do iOS development on iOS for a long time, and that's exactly what Apple are delivering. It's certainly not just a children's sandbox either.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        > It's certainly not just a children's sandbox either. It might as well be, it's not like you'd be making any apps that Apple doesn't directly profit off of. Pretty much as interesting as Nintendo's Toy-Con Garage.
honkdaddy 4y ago
I can't think of a good reason Apple would want to support developers who want to publish in their (very) walled garden but aren't willing to purchase at least one macOS device. There are services which provide virtual Macs, this isn't meant to be one of them.
- sfifs 4y ago
  Hobbyist? Student? Education? But of course that doesn't add to their monopoly profits :-)
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Those categories don’t usually need a CI/CD solution.
    - sfifs 4y ago
      The comment was in response to this, not CI/CD. > I can't think of a good reason Apple would want to support developers who want to publish in their (very) walled garden but aren't willing to purchase at least one macOS device
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Education perhaps. Kids in middle school or lower might get iPads and not laptops, and programming can be part of their curriculum.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    "Xcode Cloud is a continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode and designed expressly for Apple developers." This is a (presumably well-integrated) alternative to CircleCI. There's nothing about this particular product that would make it even remotely relevant for a middle school programming curriculum. At any rate, what you're asking for already exists — Swift Playgrounds has been around for years, it's specifically tailored for learners, is kid-friendly, and already lets you take the whole journey from your first line of code to publishing on the App Store.
diebeforei485 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if future versions of iPadOS came with support for Xcode Cloud. Or even Xcode, considering how powerful iPads are these days (M1 chip, etc).
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Xcode explicitly supports running external command-line tools in a full-permission, unjailed shell; which is entirely contrary to the iPadOS permission model. Apple's approach seems to be to use Swift packages as an alternative project type that can be shared across iPads and Macs and, most importantly, do not require support for running binaries outside of an app container. How this evolves over time depends on Apple's opinions about their operating systems. If they were to basically hand people what amounts to a manufacturer-sanctioned jailbreak, then they could port Xcode to UIKit with all the functionality it has on MacOS, save for the lack of AppKit support. Alternatively, and more likely, what they'll do is add new app extension types to do Xcode-like things in Swift Playgrounds. So if you need to, say, use Rust code in your app; you'd literally download a Rust compiler from the App Store to do that. Or they could do nothing and be satisfied with the hobbyist-grade, Swift-only programming environment they already ship.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    They could perhaps run the unsandboxed code in a VM. I’m not sure if iPhone cpus currently support this, but Mac ones do so it could be added.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      A14/M1 and higher all have the hardware for virtualization, nothing is fused off for "devices". iOS and iPadOS don't ship Hypervisor.framework but the kernel still recognizes the entitlements for using it. Apple will never sign provisioning profiles with those entitlements, of course; but on at least one particular OS version with a jailbreak you could set up hardware virtualization. See https://worthdoingbadly.com/hv/ https://worthdoingbadly.com/hv/ The main problem is purely just Apple not seeing a use case for virtualization on a touchscreen. They need to let go of at least one Strongly Held Belief.
tootie 4y ago
And now you know why Apple is worth $2T
joshspankit 4y ago
This is probably a controversial opinion, but it feels like Apple is trying to lock developers in to a single path of constantly upgrading hardware and getting more and more specialized in the skills required in the Apple ecosystem. Not just developers who try to do it for a living, but the demographic that used to be called power users (and before that: hackers): the enthusiasts that install things and dig deeper and make tools for themselves and maybe make tools for others or even transition to being career developers. It’s the developers who build the moat around the walled gardens of mobile, and enthusiasts who bring in the people in their lives. I think Apple knows this and intentionally builds new APIs (while depreciating old ones) just so they can force devs to upgrade their OS’ which in turn forces them to upgrade to the next generation of restrictive hardware and lead them further down the garden path. I have no insight in to the workings of Apple. I only see what they show to the public. I’m comfortable being wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  > This is probably a controversial opinion Apple has been well-known as a walled garden since its inception. Some are ok with that, some aren't.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >This is probably a controversial opinion, but it feels like Apple is trying to lock developers in to a single path of constantly upgrading hardware and getting more and more specialized in the skills required in the Apple ecosystem. That has literally been Apple’s business model since the 80s.
  - code_biologist 4y ago
    This is an internal NeXT video from 1991 with Steve Jobs explaining their product strategy. The more things change, the more they stay the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU
    - pjmlp 4y ago

jbverschoor 4y ago

Because of licensing.

MBCook 4y ago

Xcode 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.

BonoboIO 4y ago
„Complaining“ :D
- MBCook 4y ago
  Heh. Fixed.

derefr 4y ago

It’s a CI system with XCode as its fat client. There’s no XCode for iOS.

danpalmer 4y ago
There 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.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  You mean, there is (1) first-party children's sandbox that is being provided by Apple's good graces and private entitlements, written in their own language and only allowing you to publish applications to their heavily taxed storefront? Yeah. Sounds like Apple is starting to get serious about their developer market, huh?
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    I didn't say it was for everyone, or a general purpose development environment. iOS developers have been asking to be able to do iOS development on iOS for a long time, and that's exactly what Apple are delivering. It's certainly not just a children's sandbox either.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      > It's certainly not just a children's sandbox either. It might as well be, it's not like you'd be making any apps that Apple doesn't directly profit off of. Pretty much as interesting as Nintendo's Toy-Con Garage.

honkdaddy 4y ago

I can't think of a good reason Apple would want to support developers who want to publish in their (very) walled garden but aren't willing to purchase at least one macOS device. There are services which provide virtual Macs, this isn't meant to be one of them.

sfifs 4y ago
Hobbyist? Student? Education? But of course that doesn't add to their monopoly profits :-)
- MBCook 4y ago
  Those categories don’t usually need a CI/CD solution.
  - sfifs 4y ago
    The comment was in response to this, not CI/CD. > I can't think of a good reason Apple would want to support developers who want to publish in their (very) walled garden but aren't willing to purchase at least one macOS device
makeitdouble 4y ago
Education perhaps. Kids in middle school or lower might get iPads and not laptops, and programming can be part of their curriculum.
- pdpi 4y ago
  "Xcode Cloud is a continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode and designed expressly for Apple developers." This is a (presumably well-integrated) alternative to CircleCI. There's nothing about this particular product that would make it even remotely relevant for a middle school programming curriculum. At any rate, what you're asking for already exists — Swift Playgrounds has been around for years, it's specifically tailored for learners, is kid-friendly, and already lets you take the whole journey from your first line of code to publishing on the App Store.

diebeforei485 4y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if future versions of iPadOS came with support for Xcode Cloud. Or even Xcode, considering how powerful iPads are these days (M1 chip, etc).

kmeisthax 4y ago
Xcode explicitly supports running external command-line tools in a full-permission, unjailed shell; which is entirely contrary to the iPadOS permission model. Apple's approach seems to be to use Swift packages as an alternative project type that can be shared across iPads and Macs and, most importantly, do not require support for running binaries outside of an app container. How this evolves over time depends on Apple's opinions about their operating systems. If they were to basically hand people what amounts to a manufacturer-sanctioned jailbreak, then they could port Xcode to UIKit with all the functionality it has on MacOS, save for the lack of AppKit support. Alternatively, and more likely, what they'll do is add new app extension types to do Xcode-like things in Swift Playgrounds. So if you need to, say, use Rust code in your app; you'd literally download a Rust compiler from the App Store to do that. Or they could do nothing and be satisfied with the hobbyist-grade, Swift-only programming environment they already ship.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  They could perhaps run the unsandboxed code in a VM. I’m not sure if iPhone cpus currently support this, but Mac ones do so it could be added.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    A14/M1 and higher all have the hardware for virtualization, nothing is fused off for "devices". iOS and iPadOS don't ship Hypervisor.framework but the kernel still recognizes the entitlements for using it. Apple will never sign provisioning profiles with those entitlements, of course; but on at least one particular OS version with a jailbreak you could set up hardware virtualization. See https://worthdoingbadly.com/hv/ https://worthdoingbadly.com/hv/ The main problem is purely just Apple not seeing a use case for virtualization on a touchscreen. They need to let go of at least one Strongly Held Belief.

tootie 4y ago

And now you know why Apple is worth $2T

joshspankit 4y ago

This is probably a controversial opinion, but it feels like Apple is trying to lock developers in to a single path of constantly upgrading hardware and getting more and more specialized in the skills required in the Apple ecosystem. Not just developers who try to do it for a living, but the demographic that used to be called power users (and before that: hackers): the enthusiasts that install things and dig deeper and make tools for themselves and maybe make tools for others or even transition to being career developers. It’s the developers who build the moat around the walled gardens of mobile, and enthusiasts who bring in the people in their lives. I think Apple knows this and intentionally builds new APIs (while depreciating old ones) just so they can force devs to upgrade their OS’ which in turn forces them to upgrade to the next generation of restrictive hardware and lead them further down the garden path. I have no insight in to the workings of Apple. I only see what they show to the public. I’m comfortable being wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.

hot_gril 4y ago
> This is probably a controversial opinion Apple has been well-known as a walled garden since its inception. Some are ok with that, some aren't.
ramesh31 4y ago
>This is probably a controversial opinion, but it feels like Apple is trying to lock developers in to a single path of constantly upgrading hardware and getting more and more specialized in the skills required in the Apple ecosystem. That has literally been Apple’s business model since the 80s.
- code_biologist 4y ago
  This is an internal NeXT video from 1991 with Steve Jobs explaining their product strategy. The more things change, the more they stay the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU
  - pjmlp 4y ago