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.

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.

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

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.

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).

Because of licensing.

And now you know why Apple is worth $2T

> 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.

And 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.

Amazon also has M1 available now: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/07/general-a...

We've just set up our CI in it (set it up as a Gitlab runner), it seems to work fine. To add more complexity, it isn't even a native iOS app but Nativescript. I think we use it to make the Android builds as well.

Or use virtualbox:

https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

Why would I ever pay hetzner money when they dare to dictate what software I can/can not run.

Bitrise does a lot more than just iOS cicd

Also I wonder why they never pronounced it “Ten-Code” (after all “Mac OS X” was “Mac oh-ess Ten”)

I’ve been developing with Xcode since at least 2005 and I still have, for some reason, never gotten used to this. It’s only autocorrect that saves me, I always instinctively type it with a capital C. Weird.

Yes, can we get the title updated to fix my twitching eye?

Oh, the humanity.

Apple took the first steps to an AWS competitor in 2010 when it started working on phone CPUs.

Apple is very unlikely to build a “general cloud” offering. This is built and sold on differentiated services (eg BigQuery, Lambda, Kinesis), not on undifferentiated compute units (ie Apple Silicon even if it is slightly cheaper for the raw hardware).

Meanwhile, every time a developer uses local inference with CoreML, that competes directly with AWS’ revenue.

Apple’s “cloud” offering will be hosted in people’s pockets, powered by electricity consumers pay for, and hardware that Apple sells for a fat profit. And they will keep empowering developers to move more compute over to “the client”.

While I doubt it, I hope so.

Apple Silicon is so much more efficient on the desktop, and an AWS competitor might make it worthwhile to consider using aarm64 containers end-to-end. That would be amazing.

How does a CI/CD system lead to an AWS competitor?

That sort of raises the question: What does Xcode Cloud run on?

You would assume macOS as the operating system, but is that manageable at that scale? Maybe it runs on Linux and cross-compiles? Apple do run their own data-centers, which I assume all run Linux. If there was some headless macOS version and data-center wide management framework for it, I suspect that we would have heard about it. If the Xcode Cloud runs on macOS, does that mean that Apple have some rack mounted servers based on the M1/M2 processors?

Is that true? Have they been investing the required billions (tens of billions?) in datacenter infrastructure across the globe to do this?

3. Free through December 2023, then US$14.99 per month if you choose to subscribe at that time.

Sadly, 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.

This is just a CI/CD product. You still need a Mac and the Xcode desktop app.

Why would you? I'm of the opinion that instead of trying to fight the system you should work with it, take the path of least resistance, and work on the best solution for the problem.

Tangentially related, in my opinion, native apps built in the tooling offered by the phone's manufacturer (xcode or android studio) will always be superior - to the end-user - than any cross-platform compromise. I'll admit that e.g. react native may have a better developer experience, but you don't build apps for the developers, right?

No, 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.

As others have said, this is largely unrelated.

However, they're making some steps in the direction of letting you develop iOS apps with just an iPad, via new capabilities in Swift Playgrounds: https://support.apple.com/guide/playgrounds-ipad/get-started...

e.g. https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/05/this-to-do-list-app-is-the-fi...

Get a Mac Mini and use VNC along with a GitHub/GitLab runner. Works quite well!

If you don't want to buy one, you can rent a Mac in the cloud only when you need it (unrelated to Xcode Cloud) for 0.10€ per hour at Scaleway

If you don't care about TOS, it's very easy to run macOS on x86 hardware these days.

You still need a Mac with Xcode

Is 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.

>or are they making exemptions from their ToS for themselves

Err, allowing it to your self, is not an "exception from their ToS". The ToS, any ToS, only applies to third parties you provide a service/product to. You're free to do whatever you want with it yourself (within the general law of the land).

It's the same reason someone can't "violate" GPL by giving their own code, they wrote themselves, under a closed license as well, or even stop providing new versions under GPL altogether...

At least last summer, the machine type was “AppleQEMU” and CPU was a Xeon Gold 5218

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27698380

It's the same TOS exception that video game companies get when they patch their own games: none. Because none is required.

Really, the knee-jerk axe grinding on HN has gotten so predictable lately.

> are they making exemptions from their ToS for themselves

You can’t enter into a legal contract with yourself, and you couldn’t legally enforce terms on yourself even if for some bizarre reason you wanted to.

Really 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.

They have public documentation[1] about running macOS in a VM, so maybe they’ve let that go?

The parts of their ToS you are alluding to mostly talks about it being against ToS to run macOS on non-Apple hardware and since Apple makes chips now it’s very possible that the entire Xcloud service is running on Apple hardware.

[1]https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

I'm going to make an exception from my usual policy and go sleep in my bed without first asking my wife.

if 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.

My 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.

I think Apple can declare their TOS doesn’t apply to them.

Yeah and a great motivator for the business to do everything in their power to make the Swift compiler faster. Oh wait…

>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?

If 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

Businesses? 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.

Say 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.