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I am so happy that I don't run mac farms for building a teams ios apps anymore. Everything about dealing with apples developer ecosystem was an absolutely mise

by swozey 3y ago

I am so happy that I don't run mac farms for building a teams ios apps anymore. Everything about dealing with apples developer ecosystem was an absolutely miserable experience, from not being able to virtualize for ci builds to having to appeal half of our (we made 250-300 apps a year for events that were based on the same template, so near clones with different assets) apps rejected and allowed on appeals sort of things. Android was the polar opposite. Absolutely ridiculous that I would need an entire mac mini/studio to run ONE CI job at a time. Always felt like Apple didn't WANT us to make apps. This was 2014ish though. Is it a lot different now?

bsaul 3y ago
Same. i can't wait until i get out of the apple dev ecosystem. And i've been in it since the iphone 3gs. Everytime i work on web or backend it's like a breath of fresh air. The amount of opaque , undocumented, disfonctionning proprietary garbage one has to put up with is just depressing.
ricardobeat 3y ago
Last setup I worked on, we rented out M1s from Hetzner, and each machine could run 2 builds simultaneously. XCode makes pretty good utilization of all cores so there isn’t much benefit to parallel runs in the same machine vs a queue. We also used it for JS builds as it was way faster than the Intel runners, and 3-4x faster than GitHub’s own M1 hosts.
- manmal 3y ago
  I‘m currently setting up iOS CI, and got excited when you mentioned Hetzner, but turns out this has been abandoned. Scaleway seems like a good alternative, but 4 months of that is roughly equal to buying a refurbed machine. Since self hosted runners are easy to setup, we‘re really thinking about letting them run onsite.
  - suryao 3y ago
    Check out warpbuild.com - I'm the founder and we have ios runners that are cheaper than the github equivalent.
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    I don't know if something changed in their offering, but you can still find M1s available via the 'Dedicated -> Server Finder' page.
deleted 3y ago
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kevincox 3y ago
> Always felt like Apple didn't WANT us to make apps. No, they want you to buy each developer a Mac. Then they can be sure to hold their market dominance for developers because a Windows or Linux machine can't be used for iOS dev, but a Mac can be used for all development. This artificial restriction ensures that unless you want to buy each developer 2 laptops or have different laptops with different OSes for different teams you just go Mac.

by swozey 3y ago

bsaul 3y ago

Same. i can't wait until i get out of the apple dev ecosystem. And i've been in it since the iphone 3gs. Everytime i work on web or backend it's like a breath of fresh air. The amount of opaque , undocumented, disfonctionning proprietary garbage one has to put up with is just depressing.

ricardobeat 3y ago

Last setup I worked on, we rented out M1s from Hetzner, and each machine could run 2 builds simultaneously. XCode makes pretty good utilization of all cores so there isn’t much benefit to parallel runs in the same machine vs a queue. We also used it for JS builds as it was way faster than the Intel runners, and 3-4x faster than GitHub’s own M1 hosts.

manmal 3y ago
I‘m currently setting up iOS CI, and got excited when you mentioned Hetzner, but turns out this has been abandoned. Scaleway seems like a good alternative, but 4 months of that is roughly equal to buying a refurbed machine. Since self hosted runners are easy to setup, we‘re really thinking about letting them run onsite.
- suryao 3y ago
  Check out warpbuild.com - I'm the founder and we have ios runners that are cheaper than the github equivalent.
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  I don't know if something changed in their offering, but you can still find M1s available via the 'Dedicated -> Server Finder' page.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kevincox 3y ago

> Always felt like Apple didn't WANT us to make apps. No, they want you to buy each developer a Mac. Then they can be sure to hold their market dominance for developers because a Windows or Linux machine can't be used for iOS dev, but a Mac can be used for all development. This artificial restriction ensures that unless you want to buy each developer 2 laptops or have different laptops with different OSes for different teams you just go Mac.