Xcode Cloud overview | Hacker News Reader

Xcode Cloud overview

developer.apple.com

228 pointsmath-dev154 comments

Dumb question: why does a cloud offering require onprem macOS?

Shouldn’t folks on iOS at least be able to access XCode Cloud

Because of licensing.

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

There 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.

You 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?

I 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.

> 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.

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.

„Complaining“ :D

Heh. Fixed.

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.

Education perhaps. Kids in middle school or lower might get iPads and not laptops, and programming can be part of their curriculum.

"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.

They actually have that one covered with 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?

This 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.

Very simple programs would segfault the compiler in 1-3 as well. You'd most often notice this as your syntax highlighting went away for a period of time.

Yeah, but it was even worse in Playgrounds somehow. They were unusable even for testing a one-line piece of code.

The new Swift Playgrounds is far better than what came before it. Those versions were pretty much unusable for sustained work.

Playgrounds is mostly a local running environment if I am right ?

If you teach a class, having a CI build and run the programs, potentially taking screenshots for you to review later could be a pretty good use case, especially for remote home work.

Hobbyist? Student? Education?

But of course that doesn't add to their monopoly profits :-)

Those categories don’t usually need a CI/CD solution.

The 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

You 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

> 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.

It'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.

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).

Xcode 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.

They 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.

A14/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/

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.

Swift Playgrounds on iOS supports building apps and submitting them to the App Store. It seems like a 'trivial' extension to add in support for XCode Cloud to Swift Playgrounds.

And now you know why Apple is worth $2T

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.

> 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.

>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.

This 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

It is so funny to see people that only came to OS X, because they couldn't bother to support Linux and BSD OEMs, always being surprised by the Apple developer culture (the ones actually developing for the platform since its inception).

Not a controversional opinion at all but instead very obvious, and for a long time now.

At least macOS is a UNIX under the hood these days (unlike MacOS 9), which provides some 'cross-platform synergies', but looking at where Apple has been taking these UNIX roots with iOS that was probably just a lucky accident. Enjoy it while it lasts (on macOS at least) ;)

Had BeOS been acquired instead of the NeXT reverse acquisition, Apple's history would have been much different, and most likely there wouldn't be any UNIX desktops to chose from (as I doubt Desktop Linux would have been any different in such alternative universe).

see 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) 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. "

> 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.

Xcode Cloud can runs your various jobs and builds in parallel.

Depends on what the compute element in their cloud is.

You 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-a...

Those parallel Test will get through your hours very quickly.

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.

Managing 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.

Software updates, for one.

I'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`

If you run Asahi Linux you won't be able to do your XCode build so that kind of seems to defeat the whole purpose.

Isn't this a little like saying "Don't pay for Github, just buy a server rack"? My point being, A Mac mini != Xcode Cloud. There are other services that Xcode Cloud offers beyond a roll your own Mac mini solution. Just like how Github offers more services than a roll your own home server offers.

Managing the difference between a home server and a cloud service.

I used to manage some rack-mount servers for a garage startup. That meant dealing with:

- power (including UPS and remote power strips)

- network (LAN, router, ISP, DNS)

- server hardware

- server BIOS (i.e. pls reboot after power failure)

- OS and software updates

- user admin

- backups

And living 500 miles away from the server room taught me how many things can go wrong when I'm away, and what it takes to even monitor that. Can't easily conclude it wasn't worth, since these were multi-purpose and the equivalent capacity on EC2 would've cost a ton, but doing all that just for Xcode builds would've been silly.

Closer to the topic, I also used to just manage a remote Mac mini server. It was also not automatic. Even had both disks in my RAID1 set fail over time.

Many of those things are included in the Hetnzer contract though. They have service technicians that can perform any physical operation for you remotely. Just open a ticket.

Been hosting bare metal with them for ages and it has been very pleasant.

Then you still have to deal with the OS, user admin, and all the software yourself, right?

Will Hetzner install Linux on it for me and fix all the problems when they come up? If not, there's zero reason to purchase one of these for any professional purposes aside from iOS/MacOS CICD.

Managing 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.

Yes, because XCode famously never crashes.

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

Care to explain this one?

Folks are sad that Hetzner, like most mainstream providers, has a policy against running crypto software and port scanners.

So instead you'll give your money to... Apple?

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.

How do you like nativescript? I haven’t met anyone using it yet

For $475/month, I hope you're able to use it for more than just iOS builds.

I know I'm too hobbyist- and small-business-minded for lots of folks on HN, but that monthly fee is a mind-boggling non-starter for me. I know that cloud services are never the cheapest option and I don't want to come off as a skinflint, but AWS' Mac pricing is just absurd. Two months' rental pays for the machine outright (three, if you upgrade the RAM or storage). I wouldn't leap into running a public-facing service on a machine parked in the back corner of an office somewhere, but it's not a big deal if your CI/CD machine goes offline for a few minutes if power or data connectivity stumbles.

I've worked for a startup where we begged the IT folks to just buy us an M1 Mac Mini to stuff in the closet somewhere, or at least sign us up for Mac Stadium or something, but it was borderline impossible to convince them to do that.

Talking to DevOps folks to spin up two dedicated instances on AWS? I had access within 10 minutes.

Absolutely insane.

Amazon charges 10 times the amount of hetzner ... uncounted bandwidth usage

Or use virtualbox:

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

Achieving an open-source implementation of Apple Code Signing and notarization

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32386762

Finally, the fruits of the Buddybuild acquisition(?)

For comparison Bitrise charges 3 tokens per minute on an M1 mac and 10 000 tokens are $500. That gives you 55 hours.

Bitrise does a lot more than just iOS cicd

Not on an M1 Mac, they don't

So... let's pop the champagne for the 1,000 Billion dollar business finally engineering a cheaper way to deliver their own software?

I 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.

It’s a small c in Xcode…

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

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

For that matter it should’ve been renamed 11code alongside the release of macOS 11!

Whoever 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.

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.

Oh for fuck sake

Apple likes to write ten as the roman numeral X - that does not mean all uses of the letter X are the number 10.

Oh, the humanity.

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.

The first steps to Apple’s AWS competitor. Their multi billion contract with Amazon will end soon, so the timing makes perfect sense.

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

The 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.

They 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.

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

They 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

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.

Why is it not worthwhile to run ARM containers on AWS today? Savings should be roughly 20%.

I assume they're working on it? Lambda has supported ARM for a while and Elastic Beanstalk got support recently.

No wait ECS does support it already: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/userguide/ecs-a...

I'm not sure what I'm missing, but don't most cloud providers have ARM instances these days? We've been running most of our stuff on Graviton processors on AWS for some time now and it is a nice cost savings.

It’s not just a matter of ISA, Apple’s CPUs are significantly more performant in a number of ways compared to other ARM CPUs on the market at the moment.

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”.

I think that IF they were to do any kind of cloud offering, it would be services for apps - storage like Firebase, push notifications, analytics, in-app purchase management, that kind of thing.

My guess, they’ll contract this out to a player like Cloudflare (like with iCloud relay).

e.g. I can see Apple building a framework for “isomorphic” Apps. Where the front end in SwiftUI and backend in SwiftStateful (a hypothetical framework for permissions/auth and connecting to cloud databases) compiled and deployed to CF Workers or some other edge deployed service.

I think they might even take this one step further and make some future version of MacStudio+WiFi that downloads and executes CFs Workers. If they went this route, it’s unclear if they’d need or want a partner like CF just to deploy and cache the workers.

Disclaimer: I have an investment in Cloudflare. I have no real idea about anything really.

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?

> You would assume macOS as the operating system, but is that manageable at that scale?

Sure, it's a unix system. You can go far with SSHing into a machine and running some commands. Also, they only very recently discontinued MacOS Server (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312)

Hardware-wise, it's either a battery of Mac Minis or Mac Pros, or maybe they've made custom hardware so they can put Apple hardware in a blade server form factor.

Darwin is headless. But maybe they're running asahi, although I doubt it. To run nodes, you don't actually need a complete distribution..

All the cloud providers create custom rack servers and even silicon, so why wouldn't they have rack mounted Mx boards? Also, the Mx gives you a lot of power for per watt. Perfect use case of a DC.

Folks at e.g. MacStadium has been managing Mac minis (running macOS) at scale for a very long time. AWS also entered the space ~2 years ago. Of course Apple can do it themselves, and more efficiently.

It's macOS running in QEMU on commodity hardware.

Doesn’t that assume continued support for Intel CPUs? Once all the Macs are Apple Silicon they’d some else.

I’m sure Apple has no troubles building macOS for whatever platform they’d like.

It runs macOS on QEMU on machines that use Intel Xeon Gold 5218's - https://twitter.com/KhaosT/status/1410332951963869185/photo/...

25$ or compute hours free a month, I wonder how much tests that is, and any overhead cpu costs?

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

Does this mean one can reasonably develop ios apps without a mac?

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.

You still need a Mac with Xcode

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.

> load to test flight

The web page says it supports test flight.

Xcode 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.

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

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

> without a mac

> Get a Mac

Next recommendation is gonna be to build a Hackintosh. (Btw, I did, and I even ran Xcode on it, would not recommend.)

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...

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

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?

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 only. Apple's licensing terms require you to keep the instance for at least 24 hours[0].

[0] On the Scaleway checkout for the Mac Mini M1, at the bottom: "As required by Apple License, you must keep this Instance for at least 24 hours. You will be able to delete it only after 24 hours.".

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

Exactly. "Apple Cloud Server Mk.1", powered by a Xeon processor.

Better off with AS anyway. Edit: Welp, turns out it is on a Xeon in an emulator (see comment below).

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.

The iPhone apps where already cross-compiled from AMD64, before the switch to the Apple Silicon. It might not take that much to do the compilation on an Linux server, regardless of the underlying hardware.

There is something weird about a company that makes it's own hardware and operating system using something completely different in their datacenters. However I don't think that macOS have the tooling required to large scale installation required for something like this.

Once upon a time they did.

>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

Probably running KVM, so basically, it's their own Hackintosh?

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

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

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.

It is pretty telling that they've deliberately made devs unable to build Apple software on non-Apple hardware, though. I've already ground my Apple tree axe down to nothing and quit being an iOS app developer; fed up with their antics.

> 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.

I mean they definitely can (and do) enter in to legal agreements with “themselves”. Many companies do, especially when it comes to licensing (even Subway does it).

It’s one of the most common methods for shifting income to other countries where the taxes are lower.

No, that's two separate (but related) legal entities entering into agreements with each other.

On the surface, yes. That’s exactly why it’s legal. However, from another perspective it’s the same company.

Let’s take the Apple example:

Apple created Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe as companies that own the intellectual property that Apple uses to create it’s products.

They did this because when they make 1B profit on 10B sales (let’s pretend for the sake of easy math), they would normally have to pay tax on that 1B but instead they can say “Our agreement with Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe state that we must pay “them” 1B in licensing fees for these sales. As you can see, we have no more money left to tax.”. Since Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe are subject to different tax laws they can pay little to no tax at all.

Now: Are those separate legal companies? Yes. But when it comes down to it, are they all the company we think of when we say Apple? I would say yes.

Those are with separate legal entities like subsidiaries and franchises.

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...

They didn't "let anything go" by publishing these docs; since they've never forbidden running macOS in a VM, only running it on non-Apple hardware.

Cough cough, sarcastic old dev here "yeah, that's what XCode needed, cloud CI/CD".

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

Xcode 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.

>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

Do 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.

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.

Yeah this makes sense.

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.

Oh I thought this was for individuals for some reason.

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