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Comment by isodev | Hacker News Reader

I think the main goal of Xcode Cloud is to offer a first-party, out of the box solution for CI/CD. You'd be surprised how crappy (and expensive) GitHub's experience is when it comes to iOS and macOS builds.

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One has to wonder how much of Github's subpar experience for it is down to mac market share not making it worth improving, and Apple's own strangehold on the hardware and "odd" licencing (I know that with AWS due to Apple, you are stuck with a minimum 24 hour allocation, compared to being able to spin up half a dozen Intel/AMD/ARM instances for a few minutes then terminate them and only get build by the second.)

Interesting so another unfair advantage for Apple themselves. AWS and other vendors can't offer per second or minute billing but I assume they're doing it for the 25h of credits.

Well, GitHub is certainly in control of their own platform and a problem entirely done by themselves. For example, not making pre-release Xcode versions available on their images, or by default selecting 1-year-old versions of macOS (and as a result throwing everyone into a side quest just to get started)... and ultimately charging 3x the regular pricing for this is absurd.

> charging 3x the regular pricing for this is absurd

macOS virtualization is pricey by Apple's design. This is not just a GH problem

Surely if Microsoft (this big corp, that happens to own a cloud) wanted to find a way for GitHub to offer a pleasant experience, they would have.

Arguably, they've done the best they can do without partnering with Apple directly. Are you suggesting that they should invest in hacking MacOS to improve the customer experience?

> happens to own a cloud

macOS hardware or virtualization is beaucoup bucks in every cloud. As I said, this is not just a GitHub (or Microsoft) problem.

I didn't know you could virtualize macos.

The license restricts you to only virtualize macOS on Mac hardware, and only 2 VMs per physical machine.

CI for Mac and iOS is a disaster. We manage builds and deploys for multiple languages, platforms and cloud providers in our CI system, the _last_ thing we want is another platform to check for Mac builds.

Well that's your choice of course. I like Xcode Cloud because it knows what I expect for building an app and gets the job done. I don't like systems that need me to fiddle with infinite number of config files before they can do anything useful for me.

That's fair. I think the problem for me is that there's no in between. We use buildkite, and _everything_ goes through buildkite. We compile native desktop apps, monolithic Kotlin web backends, deploy clients to multiple different app store like platforms, servers to AWS, and the workflow is the same. Click new build, wait, fill in the form.

That's just not an option for mac or iOS in the same way it is for Windows.

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