At the last WWDC, Apple announced that Xcode cloud, whose continuous integration and delivery service (ci/cd) builds applications for all its platforms, has entered the testing phase. Although the company opened the service to more developers last year, Xcode cloud is still in the testing stage. Now, on this year's WWDC, apple is taking the beta label off the service and making it widely available to all developers.
The idea behind git based Xcode cloud is for Apple Developers in the ecosystem provide a customized ci/cd solution, which is closely combined with other developer tools in the apple ecosystem. For example, the service is built into the Xcode IDE, but it also has integration with testflight and app store connect, and xctest for creating unit and UI tests. It also integrates with major git repositories such as GitHub, gitlab, and bitbucket.
Now, the service has left the testing stage. Apple will provide all developers with 25 hours of free use time every month until December 2023. After that, the developer will pay $14.99 for 25 hours per month. Other plans also include $44.99 per month for 100 hours and $399.99 per month for 1000 hours.
Although developers have many choices in ci/cd tools. Using these tools, developers can automate most of the process of building, testing, and deploying code changes. Not many of these tools are specific to the apple ecosystem, because most of them do not focus on the enterprise market. Although semaphore, codemagic and other services also provide IOS specific functions, Xcode cloud provides developers with a single tool for all Apple platforms.
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