CUPERTINO, Calif.—Xcode Cloud, Apple's continuous integration and delivery service (CI/CD), is exiting beta and will now be available to all developers, the company announced during its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on Monday.
Xcode Cloud was first announced during WWDC in June 2021. Since then, Apple has been slowly rolling it out to more developers. But now anyone can sign up for it. The service comes in several paid tiers, but the cheapest—25 hours at $14.99 per month—will be free through December 2023. More robust plans include 100 hours for $44.99 monthly, 250 hours for $99.99 monthly, and 1,000 hours for $399.99 monthly.
This is by no means the only CI/CD solution for Apple platform devs on the market, but it promises to offer deeper and easier integration with Apple's existing development tools. It's built into Xcode, the integrated development environment used to make iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. And it works directly with TestFlight (which lets developers distribute their apps to users for prerelease testing), App Store Connect, and more.The Git-based service also plays nice with common code repositories like GitHub and GitLab. But Xcode Cloud is specific to Apple's platforms, of course.
If you're not a developer, there's little relevance for you. CI/CD facilitates reliable processes for deploying frequent, incremental code changes from developers' local machines to production, including various steps like automated testing. It's meant to ensure quality (that is, avoid bugs, conflicts, and other failures) as multiple contributors make iterative changes to a project.
But if you are a developer working in Apple's ecosystem, there's some possibility that Xcode Cloud's tight integration will be easier for you than the alternatives.
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