Open beta available to everyone: M1 is available for your iOS CI/CD needs on Bitrise, today! Accelerate your transition to Apple Silicon through our fully virtualized, scalable M1 compute options, and build and test faster than ever.
For predictable build behaviours, virtualized environments that get created as a blank slate and destroyed after your build has run, are key. On Bitrise, starting today, you’ll find the world’s first fully virtualized, truly scalable Apple silicon environment purpose built for CI/CD.
Not only does this mean a significant performance increase compared to builds run on our existing Intel-based macOS compute options, you’ll also be able to ship M1 specific features, and ensure a smooth transition as Apple silicon becomes the default for iOS development.
M1 in the Cloud for your iOS CI/CD
You and your iOS team will benefit from:
- Consistency between the local M1 Macbook environments in use by most iOS developers, and your hosted CI/CD pipelines
- An M1 environment maintained and managed 24/7 for you, in the cloud, pre-packed with the tools and dependencies you need
- Scalability: from a single concurrency to dozens, what you need, when you need it
- Increased performance compared to existing Intel-based compute options
- The ability to ship Apple silicon-exclusive features
What do you have to do?
As a first step, we suggest checking out our docs on transitioning iOS development from Intel-based Macs to M1 Macs.
If you are on a credit-based plan (Free, Teams, or Velocity), just open Bitrise, go to your app’s Workflow Editor, then pick Stacks & Machines tab. Under Machine type for the default stack, you’ll find M1 Elite XL.
If you are on an older, concurrency-based plan, you can
- either create a new Workspace to test it,
- or reach out to us and we’ll activate a trial on your current org.
If you don’t have a Bitrise account yet, sign up for free today. During the trial and as a part of our free plan, you’ll be able to build on M1 as long as you have enough credits to run your workflow.
Known issues
Using Apple silicon for iOS development is still very much a work in progress, with the necessary tooling being created by the industry as we speak. As such, our current M1 environment has some limitations and known issues:
- Android emulation is unavailable
- On rare occasions, customers may experience hanging builds caused by Metal-related bugs on Apple silicon; while we wait for Apple to fix the issue, please read our documentation or this thread for more details.
We’re working with our vendors, and the broader community to constantly improve the performance of our Apple silicon environment, so please keep an eye on our documentation for updates.
Happy building! 🚀
