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Xcode Cloud overview
- 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.
- 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.
- honkdaddy 4y agoI 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 agoHobbyist? Student? Education? But of course that doesn't add to their monopoly profits :-)
- MBCook 4y agoThose categories don’t usually need a CI/CD solution.
- sfifs 4y agoThe 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 agoEducation 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.
- kemayo 4y agoThey actually have that one covered with Swift Playgrounds: https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ You can, in fact, write an app and publish it to Apple's App Store with it, all from an iPad. I have no idea how much actual uptake this has seen, since I think the capability only came out at the start of the year?
- hot_gril 4y agoThis is probably fixed now, but around the days of Swift versions 1-3, Playgrounds were straight up broken. Very basic programs would segfault the compiler. I feel bad for any kids who may have been introduced to programming that way.
- dagmx 4y agoYou can already develop apps and publish them completely on iPadOS without a Mac. Is it logical to do so? No but it is possible and Apple sanctioned. In fact it was featured at last years WWDC
- Maursault 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. Those devs aren't going to purchase Apple hardware whether Apple sells them cheeseburgers or not, so its more profitable for Apple to sell them cheeseburgers.
- Sirened 4y agoIt's a CI/CD, not an IDE. If you want to automatically test your code on all devices in a dozen configs on multiple OS versions, you're going to need to buy some fairly expensive hardware and host it yourself, which is not exactly where the industry is going at the moment with it's "yay cloud" movement.
- 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.
- smoldesu 4y agoYou 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 agoI 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.
- 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.
- diebeforei485 4y agoI 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 agoXcode 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 agoThey 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 agoA14/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 agoAnd now you know why Apple is worth $2T
- joshspankit 4y agoThis 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 agoThis 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
- 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.
- 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.
- obenn 4y agoYou still need a Mac with Xcode
- paxys 4y agoThis is just a CI/CD product. You still need a Mac and the Xcode desktop app.
- deleted 4y ago
- 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 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.
- 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Apocryphon 4y agoFinally, the fruits of the Buddybuild acquisition(?)
- keyle 4y agoCough cough, sarcastic old dev here "yeah, that's what XCode needed, cloud CI/CD".
- 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.
- 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 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.
- nix23 4y agoOr use virtualbox: https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
- 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`
- 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 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.
- renewiltord 4y agoI'm going to make an exception from my usual policy and go sleep in my bed without first asking my wife.
- naikrovek 4y agoif they are only offering CI/CD time, they aren't doing anything forbidden to anyone else. it is lease of an entire MacOS VM that must be one 24-hours at a time, along with other restrictions.
- sokoloff 4y agoIs it really an exemption from the ToS for them to run their own operating system on other hardware? For one thing, it would still be "Apple-branded hardware" if Apple just puts an Apple sticker on it, so would literally be compliant with the same ToS they offer to everyone, but even if it wasn't based on that technicality, they reserve all other rights to their IP, so I don't see any logical or legal reason why they couldn't either make a version of Xcode that ran on an alternate OS or run macOS on other hardware.
- jhugo 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.
- 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
- 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?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 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.
- 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