For developers working on enterprise applications who need to develop for both Intel and Apple Silicon platforms, Bitrise now offers a cloud-based option offering 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 switch seamlessly 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, instead of manual configuration and troubleshooting that can cause release frequency to drop. For sophisticated mobile product organizations that rely 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 enterprise, meaning the need to port applications from Intel 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 over 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 removing 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 the virtualized Apple silicon environment in Bitrise’s 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 allows developers to build, test and deploy app updates to the App Store faster than any other solution on the market.
“This launch of a fully virtualized Apple silicon environment designed for iOS CI/CD is the first available, reinforcing our commitment to getting these kinds of capabilities into the hands of our customers faster than anyone else,” Birmacher said.
“Before using Bitrise’s Apple Silicon compute option, we struggled with our M1 builds because our third-party libraries don’t support Apple Silicon yet,” Radoslov Radenkov, an engineer at Paysafe, said in a statement. “We were able to transition and increase the speed of our builds by 50%. We’ve also reduced test times from one hour to 22 minutes.
And the WWDC?
To some extent, M1 Macs are already on the verge of being 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,” Birmacher said. 16GB memory isn’t ideal for handling larger apps, M2 will struggle to be a viable option for many iOS teams. Even M2’s 24GB memory isn’t quite enough .
Like most developers I’ve come into contact with since the show, Birmarcher was generally optimistic, saying:
“Apple’s combination of immediately available developer APIs with the many new features and functionality in iOS 16 stands out…. Developers will be able to quickly support newly announced features. It also saw the introduction of real-time widgets, l HomeKit opening and CarPlay improvements as big opportunities for app developers.
Apple also introduced some interesting changes to device management and declarative device management for Mac at the event, which I’ll have more information about tomorrow.
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