Bitrise Launches The First Scalable M1 Environment to Prepare iOS Developers For Apple Silicon’s Takeover

As Apple Completes Its Two-Year Journey to Phase Out Intel Chips, Mobile DevOps Company Bitrise Enables Companies to Seamlessly Transition to the New Architecture and Subsequent Versions

SAN FRANCISCO--()--Bitrise, the Mobile DevOps company whose platform maximizes the overall business impact of apps for the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations, today announced the release of its virtualized M1 CI/CD environment. The new cloud-based solution is the first Apple silicon-based CI/CD environment built to meet the requirements of sophisticated iOS teams and enterprises. The company collaborated with nearly 100 companies, including Paysafe, in private beta to ease their transition to M1 for mobile builds and prepare for all companies’ mass adoption of Apple silicon.

Since 2006, Apple computers have mostly been powered by Intel chips. Since its announcement at WWDC two years ago, however, Apple has undergone a journey to move away from Intel in favor of its own ARM-based Apple silicon chips. For Apple this introduces the ability to offer a more tightly integrated combination of software and hardware. For developers it means a mandatory and complicated transition to a new architecture.

To help companies and their mobile teams adapt to the change this presents to their iOS app development efforts, Bitrise set out to create the first virtualized M1 environment at scale where teams could easily switch between Intel builds and Apple silicon. Bitrise updated all of its tools and software to be compatible with Apple silicon natively, without the use of translator tools, which can slow down launches and impact performance. In addition to guiding developers through the transition, Bitrise’s M1 environment is a managed solution that doesn’t require the purchase or maintenance of physical hardware, and was built to extensively automate CI/CD and other mobile devops processes.

By providing a completely virtual CI/CD environment built specifically for M1, developers can continue to build, test, and deploy app updates to the app store quickly, maintaining previously established cycles and setting the ground work to continue scaling their app development process. By using Bitrise’s Build Insights, mobile teams can also monitor their apps performance to inform where adjustments need to be made to improve.

“Before using Bitrise’s Apple silicon compute option we were struggling with our M1 builds since our third-party libraries do not support Apple silicon yet,” said Radoslov Radenkov, Engineer at Paysafe. “With Bitrise we have been able to transition and increased the speed of our builds by 50%. We have also decreased testing times from one hour to 22 minutes.”

“We are approaching a new age of iOS development where, in order to provide an ‘Apple-approved’ experience, developers will have no option other than to build on Apple silicon,” said Barnabas Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise. “The M1 chip provides many benefits, but to take advantage of them today, developers need to be able to seamlessly switch between Apple silicon and Intel based build options. Our goal with the new M1 environment is to provide them with that flexibility, while offering a scalable solution built on our iOS CI/CD technology. As a result, teams can concentrate on expanding capabilities, instead of manual setup, and troubleshooting that can result in a drop of release frequency. For the sophisticated mobile product organizations building on Bitrise today, a delayed feature or fix can cost millions of dollars.”

About Bitrise

Bitrise is a Mobile DevOps company, whose platform is used by more than 6,000 businesses to maximize the business impact of their mobile apps. Working with Bitrise, the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations get their apps to market faster, improve security and keep up with constantly changing mobile requirements. Bitrise enables organizations to automate testing, accelerate build times, and quickly understand how new pieces of code will affect live apps. Customers such as Transferwise (now “WISE”), Virgin Mobile, Grindr, Marks & Spencer, Tag Heuer, Compass, Mozilla, Philips Hue, Babbel and others use Bitrise to rapidly respond to the changing mobile landscape. Bitrise is a Y Combinator company, headquartered in Budapest, with offices in London, San Francisco, Boston and Osaka.

Contacts

Kieran Powell
kieran.powell@channelvmedia.com

Contacts

Kieran Powell
kieran.powell@channelvmedia.com