For developers working on enterprise applications that need to develop for Intel and Apple Silicon platforms, Bitrise now offers a cloud-based option featuring the world's first virtualized M1 CI/CD environment.
Ease the transition to Apple Silicon
"The M1 chip offers many advantages, but to take advantage of them today, developers must be able to seamlessly switch between Apple Silicon and Intel build options," said Bitrise CEO Barnabas Birmacher.
The company, whose customers include N26, Transferwise (now "Wise"), Virgin Mobile, Tag Heuer, Mozilla, Paysafe and Philips Hue, sought to provide developers with that kind of flexibility while providing a scalable solution built on its own. of the company. iOS CI/CD technology.
“As a result, teams can focus on expanding capabilities, rather than manual configuration and troubleshooting that can cause release frequency to drop. For sophisticated mobile product organizations relying on Bitrise today, a delayed feature or fix can cost millions of dollars,” he said.
The introduction reflects a reality where millions of Apple Silicon Macs are already deployed across the company, meaning the need to port Intel applications to M-series processors is also growing.
What is the Bitrise offer and who is it for?
The cloud-based solution was developed in collaboration with more than 100 companies and is designed to meet the needs of sophisticated development projects. It is a managed solution that does not require the purchase of physical hardware.
Birmacher said the product is for "everyone who develops on iOS, so every iOS developer and every development team. Apple is completely phasing out Intel-based machines and the entire Intel-based development environment, so anyone developing for iOS will have no choice but to upgrade to Apple Silicon.
If you are using Bitrise, you can access Apple's virtualized silicon environment in the Bitrise workflow editor under the Stacks and Machines tab. The M1 Elite XL machine will be available there.
The environment has multiple layers of automation, including an Insights tool that allows teams to monitor application performance to identify weaknesses. It enables developers to create, test, and deploy app updates to the App Store faster than any other solution on the market.
“This release of a fully virtualized Apple silicon environment designed for iOS CI/CD is the first available, reinforcing our commitment to getting these types of capabilities into the hands of our customers faster than anyone else,” said Birmacher.
"Before using Bitrise's Apple Silicon compute option, we were having issues with our M1 builds because our third-party libraries are not yet compatible with Apple Silicon," Radoslov Radenkov, an engineer at Paysafe, said in a statement. “We were able to transition and speed up our builds by 50%. We have also reduced test times from one hour to 22 minutes.
And the WWDC?
To some degree, the M1 Macs are already about to be replaced after Apple introduced the first M2 Macs earlier this week.
"The new M2 chip is even more efficient than the M1 and offers some great features," said Birmacher. 16GB memory isn't ideal for handling larger apps, M2 will struggle to be a viable option for many iOS gear. Even the M24's 2 GB memory is not enough.
Like most developers I've contacted since the show, Birmarcher was generally upbeat, saying:
"It highlights Apple's combination of immediately available developer APIs with the many new features and functionality in iOS 16... Developers will be able to quickly support newly announced features. It also saw the introduction of real-time widgets, opening of HomeKit and CarPlay enhancements as great opportunities for app developers.
Apple also introduced some interesting changes to device management and declarative device management for Macs at the event, which I'll have more information about tomorrow.
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