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Issue 45
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Issue #45 of the iOS CI Newsletter covers the following topics:
- Does your CI/CD provider support the new Xcode 16 Beta?
- Reducing your app’s build size with a simple trick.
- How Xcode’s new setting can help you speed up your builds.
- New Xcode version defaults for GitHub-hosted runners.
Happy reading!
CI/CD providers latest software versions
Latest available Xcode and macOS versions on popular mobile CI/CD providers.
16.2 (16C5032a)
15.1 (24B2083)
16.2 (16C5032a)
15.2 (24C101)
16.2 RC (16C5031c)
15.1 (24B2083)
16.2 RC (16C5031c)
15.1.1 (24B91)
16.2 Beta (16B5100e)
14.6
16.2 (16C5032a)
14.6.1 (23G93)
15.4 (15F31d)
14.6.1 (23G93)
16.0 (16A242d)
14.5 (23F79)
✂️ Reduce your app’s binary size with a simple trick
I came across this piece of advice from Emerge Tools’ documentation that I had never considered before. As alternative app icons are only ever used at a 180x180 resolution, you can create them at that resolution and then upscale them to 1024x1024 pixels for submission and reduce your binary’s size 🤯.
With Apple’s announcement of tinted icon variants, this optimization becomes even more important!
🚀 Speed up your builds by using Xcode’s explicitly built modules setting
Xcode 16 comes with a new setting called ‘explicitly built modules’ that can help you make your app’s builds faster and compiler errors more informative.
If you’d like to learn more about how to enable this new setting and the effect it can have on your builds, check out this article by Oliver Falvai on Bitrise’s blog.
⚠️ GitHub-hosted macOS runners are changing their selected Xcode version
GitHub have recently announced some upcoming changes to the Xcode versions selected by default on their macOS runners, starting on the 22nd of July:
- macOS 13 runners will have Xcode 15.2 selected by default.
- macOS 14 runners will have Xcode 15.4 selected by default.
If you use GitHub-hosted runners as your CI/CD machines, I would recommend you explicitly set the version of Xcode to one of the above depending on which runners you use to avoid surprises later on.
📖 A guide to the App Store Connect API
I have been using the App Store Connect API extensively to build automations and new features for my app Helm, so I decided to share all my tips and learnings when working with the API in an article that I shared on Runway’s blog.
If you want to start using the API to streamline your workflow, this guide is for you!