[seanwilson]

Apple's policy on VMs feels so backwards and it really bothers me. Apple expect you to have dedicated hardware if you want to do CI? It makes Mac/iOS projects a real pain and that's not including how much hassle Xcode only functionality is to script.

[falsedan]

Apple are a hardware company… they don't make money unless you buy their hardware.

[seanwilson]

You'd think Apple would be interested in making the workflow for developers easier though so better apps would be made.

It's slightly better now but I've done iOS+Android mobile projects before where CI for Android has been easy to set up and CI for iOS has been a complete nightmare.

[falsedan]

I think the workflow is pretty easy: buy a MacBook & an iPhone, and load your app onto the phone & test on it for things which the iOS simulator is not good at.

Don't CI your apps, CI your libraries.

[seanwilson]

> I think the workflow is pretty easy: buy a MacBook & an iPhone, and load your app onto the phone & test on it for things which the iOS simulator is not good at.

> Don't CI your apps, CI your libraries.

That's not scalable for complicated apps that you can write automated UI tests for though.

[falsedan]

Could you take the complicated bits and put them in a library? How complicated is your app?

To me, what you described is an app that was not designed to be easy to test component-by-component & will have a high overhead on maintenance. Apple’s restriction on virtualising MacOS seems unrelated to how the app was architected, so it feels unfair to expect Apple to alter their position to better support something they weren’t responsible for.

[seanwilson]

> To me, what you described is an app that was not designed to be easy to test component-by-component & will have a high overhead on maintenance. Apple’s restriction on virtualising MacOS seems unrelated to how the app was architected, so it feels unfair to expect Apple to alter their position to better support something they weren’t responsible for.

We have complex commercial apps with fully automated user interface tests (e.g. it'll test that you can enter your username + password, actually login and you'll be able to see content). You could test all the individual components as much as you want but you're still going to get bugs at the UI layer that you can automatically test for.

We do the same for Android and CI for that is so much simpler.

> Apple’s restriction on virtualising MacOS seems unrelated to how the app was architected, so it feels unfair to expect Apple to alter their position to better support something they weren’t responsible for.

You'd think they'd want to support workflows that led to better quality apps being created. Surely it's their responsibility to support developers?

[santaclaus]

But most of the hardware sales are iPhones. Mac sales are dominated by portables, and I doubt that many serious providers are hosting anything off of MacBooks.