I've using Bitrise for a few years and it's one of the few tools in my stack I don't think about, which is the highest praise I have for infrastructure.
The mobile side is clearly built by people who ship mobile apps. New Xcode versions turn up fast, the stacks are kept clean, and the stuff that usually breaks on mobile CI breaks a lot less here.
RDE is the first new thing in a while that actually changed my day rather than just making builds faster. A real Mac with the right setup in seconds, and I can hand one to an agent and let it get on with it.
Support answers fast, and they tell you straight when something isn't supported.
Bitrise
Hey Product Hunt, I'm Barnabas, Bitrise founder here 👋
Something changed this year that nobody sized their CI for… AI agents don't get tired. They push at 2am, they open 5 PRs while you're in a meeting, and every one of those needs a build.
That turns your CI from a background cost into the thing everyone is waiting on (and it’s annoying). And if you're on GitHub Actions, your Mac builds still run on slow M2 hardware with 5 cores. Fine when a human pushed three times a day. Not fine now.
💻 Our new product, Bitrise Build Hub, is managed build infrastructure for mobile. Our own Mac and Linux machines, preloaded with Xcode, simulators, Fastlane and the rest of the toolchain, plugged into GitHub Actions as runners.
You keep your GitHub Actions, you change the runs-on line. The same workflow runs on the newest Apple silicon we have instead. It's really that easy.
⚒️ I’m the founder, so I’m obviously biased, but here is why I think Bitrise Build Hub can be a huge time saver for all mobile teams using GitHub Actions:
iOS builds 54% faster (we benchmarked this 🙂)
Android 31% faster on fewer cores,
Pre-warmed machines so nothing queues, and a 99.9% uptime SLA.
We own the hardware, which is why we can move quickly on it. We'll be the first GitHub Actions infrastructure with M5 Pro in the fleet.
I will be in the comments all day. Tell me what your build times look like now; I'm genuinely curious how they have changed since the agents arrived.
Orbital
Congrats on the launch again! You guys are on a roll lately. A few questions:
1) So essentially you're saying if we use GitHub Actions as our CI, we can run Bitrise's infra + machines to speed up our build times, instead of using the default ones GitHub provides?
2) I also noticed the graphic above it mentions Mac M4 Pros? Is there a timeline on when we can expect M5s also?
Bitrise
@djoragui Thanks for checking our products. Love to see you here again. Let me pin my tech team to follow up :)
Bitrise
@djoragui thank you, thank you! appreciate the support.
1) Exactly, you nailed it! your GitHub Actions jobs and workflows stay exactly as they are and Build Hub provides the speed and reliability underneath with just one YAML line change.
Bitrise
@djoragui
2) We've already mapped out our M5 Pro Mac mini runners and the specs we're going for (the X-Large is an 18-core CPU with 54GB RAM), check out the full details here. Apple opened pre-orders on 25 August, and we'll roll them into the fleet as soon as they arrive. We plan to be the first GitHub Actions runner alternative to add them, which is exactly what we aim for with each new Apple silicon release. Fun fact: GitHub's fleet still caps out at M2 Pro 👀
Orbital
@catherine_doyle Thanks for the heads up! Great to see Bitrise leading in this area
FlowMarket
Congrats on Launch! I wish I had something like this, back during my mobile development agency era :) How are you adapting Bitrise to handle much higher volume of code and releases AI-assisted development creates?
Bitrise
@davitausberlin thank you for the question!
We are seeing a huge increase in our customers' usage and it's not slowing down. Agentic or AI assisted development is putting a lot of stress on the available infrastructure.
In the last years we made lot of investments in this area and moved into dedicated data centers in the US and in the EU as well. This added control gave us the opportunity to own the whole stack, from the machines till the software layer. This means that we can react extreamly fast to rolling out new macs when Apple releases them, getting the best hardware that gives you the spead gains and to also continuously invest early on to the stacks. This way we can make sure that our customers don't need to think about infra, just focus on the development and we will handle all the scaling needs.
Bitrise
Hey@davitausberlin,
keeping the speed with the increased demand is a fun challenge for all of our products. It is a combination of hardware and software improvements. We continuously expand our macOS and Linux fleet with new machines, which is a must-have. Besides that, we have several projects to optimize fleet usage, like boot time reductions, making builds faster, etc.
Bitrise
@davitausberlin amazing question :) We actually saw 161x is the growth in AI-attributed builds, so your question is spot on
Bitrise
Hello, I'm Balázs. I spend most of my time building new functionality and increasing visibility in Bitrise Build Hub. My most recent development project was the enhanced quota management, which enabled dynamic machine allocations across multiple machine pools.
What I'm most excited about next is giving our customers a clearer view of what is happening under the hood, so when something goes south, they can quickly see where the problem is and act on it. I'm also personally invested in proactive monitoring so we can discover issues before they ever reach our customers. And as you probably guess, I’m a software engineer as well 🙂
Ecoisme 2.0
I got a question form my mobile team - if my team is using multiple Xcode versions, how can Build Hub support that?
Bitrise
@adiatlov You can create multiple machine pools, each of them needs to define the machine type and the virtual machine image to be used. A single VM image contains multiple Xcode minor versions. See details here (docs)
Bitrise
Thank you for the question,@adiatlov!
We are rolling out Xcode support within 24h to our stacks and we are supporting tons of versions in parallel. You can actually take a look here: https://bitrise.io/stacks/
Your team can easily switch between these stacks for the different builds and workflows, depending on what they need.
Bitrise
@adiatlov The best part of Build Hub is that you have a wide range of options to choose from AND older versions of Xcode and macOS are also supported for the longest time in the industry. So you can go back and test without reinstalling your laptop :)
Remy AI
This looks cool. Is it your own hardware, or built on top of a cloud provider?
Bitrise
@artyom_zhuravlev appreciate your support 🙏
Bitrise
@artyom_zhuravlev thank you!! The hardware is our own. We design our own racks, our "Mini Orchard" fits 32 Mac Minis in a 6U chassis, on 10 Gigabit Ethernet with 4TB NVMe SSDs, in our own US and EU data centres. That's why the whole stack is tuned for mobile rather than rented from a general-purpose cloud, and it's how we keep Xcode current and the cache co-located.
Bitrise
@artyom_zhuravlev Bitrise is vertically integrated, they built their own Mac mini housing for best efficiency for cooling and density, check out this: https://bitrise.io/blog/post/from-ci-pipelines-to-sheet-metal-sorcery-bitrise-introduces-mini-orchard
Ecoisme 2.0
Congrats on the new product! Is it different from Remote Dev Environments that you pushed live last week?
Bitrise
@adiatlov, thank you for the question!
Last week we have announced Remote Dev Environments, which is focused on giving agents an environment to parallelize their work.
With Build Hub we are aiming to give a better solution for users who decided to use GitHub Actions.
We are bringing all the great parts of the Bitrise CI and built it around GitHub Actions. That means that by changing one line you can use our infrastructure with a lot faster machines which is actually cheaper than GHA. You get access to our additional products, like Build Cache and Release Management, and much more.
You can easily try it out by just changing one line and you can see yourself the change in build speed.
Bitrise
@adiatlov @birmacher Thanks! And yes, Barnabás said it above, but here's how I think about the two.
1️⃣ Mobile teams don't have one problem, they have a chain of them: writing the code, building it, keeping builds fast, getting the app into the stores, then shipping fixes without waiting for review. and much more :)
2️⃣ Bitrise covers that whole chain, CI, caching, build infrastructure, release management, over-the-air updates.
3️⃣ RDE and Build Hub are two points on that chain. RDE is where the code gets written, by you or by your AI agents. Build Hub is what runs the build afterwards, on our machines instead of GitHub's (as it's much haster).
I hope it's more clear now :)