Stay up to date with the latest iOS CI/CD news

🍏 WWDC is just around the corner!

This week Apple revealed the dates for this year’s WWDC and opened requests for tickets. This year’s event will take place from the 10th to the 14th of June at Apple Park in Cupertino.

As the time approaches, we all begin to wonder what Apple will announce this year and begin to draft our wishlist for this year’s events.

To commemorate the announcement, I decided to put together a list of features I would love Apple to bring into Xcode Cloud this year:

• Standalone support for Swift Packages: This is now only possible through a workaround that requires creating an Xcode project with an app target that has an associated App Store Connect app.
• Fastlane deliver-like support for screenshots and metadata: Similar to the way we can automate uploading release notes with Xcode Cloud by writing to a file in the repository, I would love to see support for also uploading screenshots, promotion text and other similar metadata.
• Custom action steps: The actions you can perform during a workflow are limited and there are some times when you want to perform a custom one. For example, you might want to have a workflow that creates a branch and triggers a separate workflow without building the project or running any tests, which isn’t currently possible in Xcode Cloud.

I would love to see your wishlists for this year’s event, so please reply to this email or message me on social media with what you’d like Apple to announce!

🤩 AppCircle: The ultimate replacement for AppCenter (Sponsored)

Microsoft recently announced that the popular mobile app distribution service AppCenter is scheduled for retirement on the 31st of March of 2025.

If you currently use AppCenter as your build distribution platform and need an alternative, look no further. AppCircle is an enterprise-grade fully automated mobile DevOps platform that focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on app distribution. On top of providing an excellent app distribution service, they also offer amazing features such as built-in unit and UI test automation on real devices, seamless integration with common testing frameworks and ready-to-use CI/CD widgets.

🚀 Automatic Swift Package releases with GitHub Actions

I have recently been working on a new Swift Package library that supports iOS, macOS and Linux. As I wanted the development lifecycle to be fast and iterative, I decided to make the library’s release process as automated and as error-proof as possible with a CI/CD workflow.

If you’d like to learn how to automatically build and test your library on all your supported platforms, check your source code to detect non-inclusive language and only create a new release if all checks succeed, make sure you read this article on my blog.

💻 How to package and distribute Mac apps

Apple has updated and released several developer resources this week. Amongst these updates, is a new comprehensive guide on how to package and distribute macOS software with numerous code examples.

The article will guide you through the steps and options you have to package, sign and distribute your app outside the App Store.

🔐 Secret scanning now detects secrets in GitHub wikis

GitHub’s secret scanning is a feature that checks for secrets in your repository’s files and warns you when one is detected. It’s a feature I use extensively and that helps me tackle vulnerabilities.

This week, GitHub announced that secret scanning also works in wikis.

🆕 Roundup of all updates to GitHub-hosted runners

GitHub has made numerous updates to its suite of cloud-based virtual machines available for GitHub Actions.

The most important news for us Apple Developers is that M1 macOS runners are no longer on public beta and are now generally available.