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Bitrise Remote Dev Environments - Cloud Macs your coding agents can actually build on

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Bitrise RDE gives you cloud Macs & Linux machines that start in seconds, the same machines, stacks and caches as your CI. Give every agent its machine and run them in parallel via MCP, or attach VS Code, Cursor or Claude Code. Archive when you stop, restore later.

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Maker
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Hey Product Hunt, I’m Arpad, VP of Engineering at Bitrise (mobile DevOps startup).

Agents need somewhere real to run.
You can hand an agent a task, but it has to execute somewhere.

❌ On your laptop it fights you for the CPU and the simulator, running multiple in parallel and you won’t be able to do a video call without CPU clipping and fans screaming.
❌ In a throwaway container it has no real device tooling, no warm dependencies and no memory of the last run, so it spends its first tokens rebuilding an environment it’s about to lose again.

✅ Bitrise Remote Dev Environments are that somewhere:

  • Bitrise RDE are on-demand cloud VMs (real macOS on Apple Silicon, or Linux) that an agent drives headless through our open-source MCP server.

  • Start a batch on different branches, → let them work in parallel, → collect the PRs. Or attach VS Code, Cursor or Claude Code over SSH and work in it yourself, like a laptop, but many.

The reason it actually works: these are the same machines that run production builds for mobile teams at scale. Same Apple Silicon hardware, same stacks, cloned from the same golden image the CI build fleet uses.


🤷‍♀️ Honestly this came out of a thing that annoys all of us. CI fails on something your laptop never hits: a different Xcode, a stale pod cache, a simulator runtime you don't have locally. You pull the branch, it passes, and your afternoon is gone comparing two machines instead of fixing the bug.

Agents made it worse: same problem, none of the judgement. It burns tokens down rabbit holes, sometimes fixes the environment only to hit the same wall next run in a fresh VM, then confidently opens a PR that can’t build – or fixes the wrong thing.

So we gave the human and the AI agent the same machine. When the environment you write code in is the one that tests it, a whole category of works-on-my-machine stops existing. Ask me anything about how it works, what it costs, or where it still falls short.


Maker

Hi Product Hunt!

RDE started as an internal tool to solve our own daily headaches at Bitrise. I wrote the first commit in January and designed the core: a template describes the machine, the scripts, and the secrets, and every session is a self-contained snapshot of it. That is the boring foundation behind "pre-configured and ready to go out of the box", and it is why we quickly realized this could work for other teams too.

💜 The decision I am proudest of came in the first month. We put a terminal with Claude Code into every session and shipped an MCP server, so an agent could open, drive, and clean up an RDE without a human in the loop. At the time it looked like a nice extra. It quickly became the main way sessions got opened at Bitrise!

Maker

 I loved seeing how much passion the engineering team put into Bitrise Remote Dev Environments 💛

What's exciting is how RDE works: instead of wrestling with local setup, you direct an agent to spin up a pre-configured Linux or macOS VM, run end-to-end tests, and validate ideas in minutes.

So with device sessions, the agent can boot an iOS simulator or Android emulator, install the build, tap through it, and screenshot to verify. "Run the app and tell me if the new screen looks right" is now a real instruction. And this is insanely cool

Maker

Hi Product Hunt!

I worked on Bitrise CI before joining the RDE team, and what surprised me most was how much carried over. Running macOS and Linux machines at scale, keeping stacks and images current, making a VM boot fast and come up identical every time. That's years of work we didn't have to redo. RDE started from there instead of from zero.

The same holds a level up. is a platform, not just CI (Build Cache, Release Management, the integrations underneath all of it) and RDE is one more thing that plugs into it.

Our GitHub integration is the example I know best: if your workspace has repos connected to Bitrise, your engineers get git access inside an RDE without anyone pasting a personal token into a VM. A team that's already on CI onboards in minutes.

There's still a long list of things the platform already does that we haven't wired up yet, and that list is the fun part. It goes the other way as well: a lot of what we're building for RDE is going to end up back in the rest of the platform.

Maker

 This is so cool! What would be the next plans for the roadmap? :)

Maker

 Thanks! The near-term theme is reusing what a workspace has already set up for CI: third-party integrations, secrets, connected repos. If it's configured for your builds, it should be available in RDE without a second setup step.

Beyond that, two things I'm personally excited about. One is Build Cache: the same cache that speeds up CI builds could serve builds running on an RDE, so a fresh environment doesn't start cold.

The other is Release Management: an RDE can already run simulators and emulators, so it's a natural place to install an app bundle from a release and let a human or an agent test it, with no local device setup.

Plenty more on the list, but those are the ones I'd bet on first 🙂

Maker

 Thanks for the details, I think all of that will 10x the product. On the caching side it always amuzed me how it can speed up time

Maker

👨‍🔧 More technical details on Bitrise Remote Dev Environments if you’d like to learn more: 

  • Real macOS on M2 Pro / M4 / M4 Pro (M6 and M5 Pro coming soon) + Linux from 2 to 48 vCPU. US and EU regions.

  • $20/month gets you 1,440 minutes per OS. 

  • Overage is $0.0288/min on macOS, $0.0044 on Linux, and it stops at a monthly cap – hit the cap and you keep running free for the rest of the month.

  • 14-day trial, no auto-charge. 

  • Agents running inside the VM use your own account and API keys. 

🔗 Docs:

❌ What it isn’t: no Windows. And it’s mobile-first by heritage. If you’re a pure web team you’ll find it works fine, but you’ll notice we built the Apple path first.


Maker

 Any plans for focusing on web direction?

   Absolutely, and you don't have to wait for it, you can already use RDE for non-mobile projects today. Docker is preinstalled, so a typical web stack works out of the box.

The way we think about it: RDE is really about reliable, scalable, isolated environments, and the interfaces around it so you can quickly create as many of these as you need, manually or via an AI agent. Mobile builds and tests just happen to be the most demanding case, so if it's powerful enough for those, it's more than enough for a web project. But nothing in the interface is mobile-specific - you can work on any project in RDE, with any agent.

We're continuously gathering feedback from RDE users and shaping the product around it, so if you (or anyone reading this) try it with a web project, tell us what's missing, that's exactly what drives what we build next.

Maker

   Thanks for the details 🗺️

Maker

 while most web projects already have good support elsewhere, you can also use Bitrise RDE for it. It makes especially sense if you have both mobile app and web backend, coding/testing/delivering all with Bitrise is likely the best choice in the industry right now.

(I use Bitrise RDE for both ios/android app and their backend development)

Maker

Happy Thursday, everyone 👋

I’m so proud to hunt Bitrise Remote Dev Environments ✨

I've known Bitrise since 2015, back when I was running my own startup for iOS

developers (Flawless App). Mobile CI was painful back then, and Bitrise was the tool iOS developers

recommended to each other. 10 years later, and the team is covering every part of

mobile DevOps.

Bitrise has CI to build and test, caching to keep it fast, build infrastructure, release

management to get builds to the app stores, and over-the-air updates. Now the team

has released RDE, cloud environments where developers & AI agents code 🤖


This is insanely cool!!! Now the community can code and run agents on the same

machines as their CI.

I love how Bitrise Remote Dev Environments make life for

developers (and AI agents) simpler 💜 Super happy to be part of this launch.

Maker

 Mobile development has changed a lot, and fast. I don't think support for coding agents was on anyone's roadmap two years ago! Exciting to be part of this.

Maker

 and right now you can't do anything without AI agents and you need to run them somewhere :) So RDE is very very timely

Maker

 we are sooo lucky to have You with us! 🤩

Looks awesome! Congrats with the launch, team! 🙌

How do I start using the RDE?

Maker

 Thanks for the support!

You can try out RDE with a 14 day trial . Our can be useful when you're getting started.

Let us know if you have any other questions!

   I already have Bitrise account for Build Hub. Do I get 14 days trial as well?

Maker

     haha, good one :) reach out to my team - we can make something for you 🎁

Maker

     lucky you, you do get 2 weeks trial! :)

Maker

 On the technical side, you can create and connect to sessions through several clients. CLI, UI, MCP server, or VS Code plugin. I think the Quickstart will be the best place to explain the tech setup:

Maker

 landing page, start the trial and build something great! 😊

Maker

The parts I use most: 

  • iOS Simulators and Android Emulators – run tests, or just look at the app.

  • Archive (Suspend). Stop for the day and the disk state is saved with no meter running. Restore on Monday and your branch, your caches and your half-finished thoughts are all still there.

Sounds great, congrats for getting this out! Is it possible to run multiple agents on different branches and how are they not going to step each other?
Maker

 Thanks for checking out RDE, Tony 🎉 Great q!

Maker

 I just checked the docs on this.

Yes, you can run as many in parallel as your subscription/contract allows you to run. Typically, one agent <> one VM is how we use it. We have an orchestrator we call “Kolega” that coordinates these agents, there is an open-source reference code for it on GitHub.

And they all use git/github to collaborate code and changes, just like any software engineer groups. My teammate and RDE maker ✨, wrote a good guide on this

Congrats on the launch! How long are the VMs stored, how long can I restore them and work on them?

Maker

 Thank you so much for your support 🎉💛

Maker

 

On the virtual machines being stored, I checked with my team:


VPs can be shored indefinitely, as long as you don't delete it and the stack it was created from is still available on Bitrise. There is no inactivity-based deletion of terminated sessions.

However! Your session's disk holds only your changes on top of that stack image, so it can't be started once the image is gone. Stack removals follow the published stack deprecation and removal policy, with at least four weeks' notice. Upcoming removals are listed on the upcoming stack deprecations page, and you can subscribe to RSS updates to follow them.

Maker

Hi Product Hunt, I’m Szabi, Distinguished Software Engineer and Tech Lead of Platform at Bitrise. 👋

I loved working on this product. Persistent disks at SSD speed for macOS VMs was one of the hardest problems. Think of it as EBS for EC2 Macs, except it runs at local SSD speed. It's what lets you or an agent work in an RDE for days and have every line of code, every cache, and every dependency still be there next session. Today we get there by accepting some extra startup and shutdown time. We already have a proof of concept with the same disk performance and zero added delay. Stay tuned!

Maker

 Thanks for all your help with RDE 💛 This was such a team effort product :)

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