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Issue 23
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Hey everyone! đ Welcome to the twenty-third issue of the iOS CI Newsletter. Hope youâve had a great couple of weeks!
I am very excited to announce that I have recently launched a brand new macOS app called QReate that allows you to generate fully customisable QR codes to help you showcase your work.
As it couldnât be any other way the deployment process is fully automated using Xcode Cloud, which has helped me save a lot of time and effort when releasing new versions of the app.
I have shared extensive content about my experience using Xcode Cloud (TLDR; I am a big fan â¤ď¸) so if youâre interested in learning more about it, check out these free resources I have created:
- Xcode Cloud scripts: Fastlane and Cocoapods
- Xcode Cloud: Generating and translating TestFlight test notes automatically
- Collecting Xcode Cloud metrics using webhooks
- GitHub webhooks đ¤ Xcode Cloud
- Scheduling app releases with Xcode Cloud
- NYSwifty 2023: Getting started with Xcode Cloud
đ Finding dead code in your app with Reaper
Emerge Tools have recently launched another great framework called Reaper that helps you identify dead code in your application and remove it. Whatâs cool about this new framework is that it doesnât just do a static analysis of your code but instead detects unused code at runtime.
If you want to find out more about how it works and how you can try the beta version out, check out this article by Noah Martin.
đĽď¸ Migrating to self-hosted M1 Mac runners
If you use the GitHub Actions default macOS runners for your CI/CD, you will notice that they can be quite slow and expensive to run. For this reason, many teams have started migrating to self-hosted runners to save money and time.
This is exactly what the team at Whatnot did and one of their engineers, Adrian Ĺliwa, wrote a great article about the process and how migrating to self-hosted EC2 macOS instances helped them save around $5,000 per month! đ¤Ż
đ¨ CircleCI + chruby breaking changes
A couple of weeks ago I came across this thread on Twitter where Roger Oba, one of Fastlaneâs contributors, explained why Fastlaneâs CircleCI workflows suddenly stopped working.
If youâre a CircleCI and your workflows have recently started failing, make sure you check this thread out!
đ How do symbols affect app size?
I learnt a lot about the nm command from this article by Mohammad Faani and how to use it to inspect the size impact of symbols in an appâs binary.
If youâre interested in learning more about the changes you can make to reduce your appâs size, make sure you check this article out!
đ¨ Making your builds faster
Are you and your team struggling with slow build times? If you are, you should check out this article by Manu Herrera where he goes through how you can identify whatâs slowing your compile times down and also gives you plenty of tips on how to make your builds faster!