Stay up to date with the latest iOS CI/CD news
Every two weeks, directly to your inbox and packed with everything you need to know and be aware of so that you're always prepared for the next app release!
Read and trusted by engineers from:
Issue 62
Sponsored
Enjoy the fastest Apple Silicon chips at a fixed monthly price — fully managed so you can focus on shipping great code. Get an additional 50% off your first month with code IOSCI50OFF — exclusively for subscribers. Start your free 10-day trial now.
As you probably know by now, Hidde and I are actively working on a native macOS (and soon iOS 👀) App Store Connect client called Helm. As you can imagine, the app makes extensive use of the App Store Connect API to both read and modify information in App Store Connect, and, to make our lives easier and give us the best chance of success, we decided very early to piggyback on the amazing work that Antoine van der Lee had already done in the field and use his appstoreconnect-swift-sdk.
The SDK provides us with a set of autogenerated type-safe endpoints and handles the process of creating JSON Web Tokens from a set of API credentials, which is not a simple process.
As we’re good friends with Antoine and we’re probably the biggest users of the SDK by now, we decided to help maintain it. And you might be wondering, why are you telling us all of this Pol? 😅
Well, I wanted to share how we use CI/CD in the SDK to work in our favor in a couple of ways:
- Check for new ASC API versions automatically: We found that we were constantly missing important updates to the App Store Connect API, so we decided to work on a scheduled workflow that checks for new releases of the API and creates a PR for us automatically.
- Test on all available platforms: This is somewhat of a recent addition, but we made use of Matt Massicotte’s Swift Package template to add a workflow that runs the unit tests for all the platforms the SDK supports, including Linux. As a fun fact, when I implemented this workflow, I realised that the tests were failing on Linux and we had not noticed before 😱.
These are for me two great examples of how CI/CD can work in your favor and save you some time and I thought it would be interesting to share in this issue!
CI/CD providers latest software versions
Latest available Xcode and macOS versions on popular mobile CI/CD providers.
16.2 (16C5032a)
15.3 (24D60)
16.2 (16C5032a)
15.2 (24C101)
16.2 (16C5032a)
15.2 (24C101)
16.2 (16C5032a)
15.2 (24C101)
16.2 (16C5032a)
14.6
16.2 (16C5032a)
14.6.1 (23G93)
15.4 (15F31d)
14.6.1 (23G93)
16.0 (16A242d)
14.5 (23F79)
🧪 Exploring built-in fastlane actions
After years of active development, fastlane has truly become a standard in the community and helps many mobile apps of all shapes and sizes automate their release processes.
One of the things that makes fastlane so powerful is the amount of built-in actions and lanes that have been added over the years and are available out of the box. In this article, Noam walks you through some interesting ones you should know about.
🇪🇺 New requirements for apps in the EU are now enforced
I have talked about the important new requirement that Apple has introduced for apps available in the European Union to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act a fair amount in the past.
This requirement has now come into full effect, which means that any apps that have not yet declared their trader status have been removed from the store in the European Union. Make sure you go and declare your trader status now if you haven’t done so yet!
🖥️ Bitrise makes M4 Pro runners available
If you’re a Bitrise user, here’s some great news for you! Last week, Arpad Kun, their VP of Engineering and Infrastructure, announced that they are adding M4 Pro Mac Mini machines to their fleet of macOS runners.
If you want to benefit from the performance and speed improvements on your CI/CD workflows, make sure you read the announcement post and sign up for early access!
👨✈️ GitHub Copilot for Xcode is now generally available
A while back, GitHub announced an official Copilot extension for Xcode. This was music to my ears, as I enjoyed using Copilot on VSCode and wished that they would make the extension available to Xcode too.
On the 14th of February, GitHub announced that the extension is now generally available. I have been using it since it came out and I have to say I love it, make sure you check it out! 😻
🛸 Emerge tools CLI is available
As if the Emerge Tools product was not good enough already, they have now added a CLI to their suite. This new tool allows you to interact with most of Emerge Tools’ services and it is designed for a seamless CI/CD integration.
Make sure you read the article and learn about how you can start using the CLI right away!