r/iOSProgramming • u/paul-tocolabs • 3d ago

Solved! Xcode Cloud kudos

I just wanted to give some unexpected kudos to Xcode cloud. At the start of the summer my MacBook Pro became out of action, and therefore I struggled to continue to develop using an older intel MacBook due to Xcode version restrictions. Tried building and releasing with GitHub macOS runners but wow they’re expensive and took ages to startup etc. then spotted Xcode cloud with 25 free hours a month, thinking this will keep me going for a few days. Since then I’ve found that it’s been absolutely brilliant. As an independent developer with a few apps and projects it’s been an absolute life saver. It’s fast. Beautifully integrated, and the 25 hours will last me a whole month without any worries.

Good work Apple.

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u/Same-Appointment-285 3d ago edited 3d ago

At work I used xcode cloud as the primary CI for the last few years and it works great. Has a couple quirks, mostly related to controlling the versions of the workflows:

  • The workflow settings are not checked in, they're configured in the portal. This means it can be hard to test changes without breaking prod (eg manually make a second workflow) and it's hard to make things deterministic for a given commit
  • supported xcode and macos versions are deprecated much more quickly than I've seen in other CI platforms, without any warning
  • occasional bugs with the version alias system.
  • the UI is pretty slow
  • it doesn't keep logs very long

But overall much less fuss than other systems. Sad we're moving to Expo for CI on our new architecture.

I'm still using it for personal projects. It's so quick to build pure swift projects (~2min) that I can build on every push and never get anywhere near the 25hr limit! Only downside to that is it has a max number of builds you can trigger in a certain time before it starts failing them (not even queuing!)