Intel Machine Deprecation Notice

Dear Bitrise Community,

We wanted to give you a heads-up that we are deprecating the use of Apple Intel machines and transitioning to Apple Silicon machines.

We are making this change because Apple is moving away from Intel processors and towards their own silicon-based processors. This shift has been taking place over the past few years, and we believe that it is essential for us to follow suit in order to ensure that we can provide the best possible support for our users.

We also believe that this move will result in better performance, faster build times, and more efficient workflows for you, our customer. Our goal is to provide you with the best possible experience, and we believe that Apple Silicon machines will help us achieve that goal.

Your team will be contacted directly, via email, with your migration date.

The Apple Silicon machines have proven to be faster, more efficient, and perform better than the Intel-based machines. Some customers have reported an average 43% improvement in build time when switching to Apple Silicon! :tada:

To help get you started testing, we’ve put the following in place:

  • Easier testing of the Apple Silicon stacks. We’ve implemented a “re-run on Apple Silicon” button on every Intel build status page so you can quickly assess the power of the Apple Silicon machines! Failed on Apple Silicon? No worries, open up the failed build, and you will be able to rerun the same workflow on our Rosetta-enabled stacks.
  • Proactively migrating you to the Rosetta-enabled stacks to mitigate risk around breaking builds starting on your migration date above.
  • This dedicated forum tailored to discussions about Apple Silicon. Here you can talk to us about your challenges and view resources for smooth integration with Mac hardware architecture.
  • A dedicated customer support team with mobile experts ready to answer any questions and/or help you with the transition.
  • A compilation of helpful links to our developer document center for transitioning your mobile app development from an Apple Intel machine to the new Apple Silicon machine.

Ready to test?

You can make the switch to Apple Silicon machines with just a few clicks. Go to the Workflow Editor for your app → Stacks & Machines → and select Apple Silicon as the default and/or for specific workflows. Note that Apple Silicon requires Xcode version 13.0 or newer.

We understand that transitioning to new hardware can be challenging, and we want to assure you that we are here to support you every step of the way. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our customer support team or our dedicated forum if you have any questions or concerns.

1 Like

Are you guys going to support the AVD Manager step on M1 ? When we try to migrate M1 on Bitrise we were getting the error "**Warning:** This Step is not yet supported on Apple Silicon (M1) machines. If you cannot find a solution to this error, try running this Workflow on an Intel-based machine type."

Running this Step on Apple Silicon machines is not officially supported. This change adds some additional warning text to help make that clear to users if the step fails and they don’t expect it.

All our devs are using M1 machine locally and we don’t have issues when running our tests locally so we are assuming this is related to Bitrise.

3 Likes

What’s your plan for the Xcode 12 stacks – or will the M1 migration be later than the Xcode 15 release when we’d already expect Xcode 12 to be removed?

Also, we make heavy use of the Intel Standard machines, but there’s no equivalent M1 standard machine on the Velocity plans. Is that an oversight?

Hi! Thanks for reaching out with your question!

Unfortunately, the M1 chip does not currently support the virtualization technology required to run the Android emulator. We have updated the warning message here:

Our recommendation would be either to build and test on our Linux stacks or using a product like Firebase for running tests.

Hope you found this helpful!

Any information about cost changes?

The base Apple Intel build stack is 2 credits per minute.

The base Apple Silicon build stack is 4 credits per minute.

Will there be a lower priced Apple Silicon build stack to replace the deprecated Intel option? Otherwise this deprecation has the same effect as a 100% price increase.

4 Likes

Hi, thanks for reaching out!

I believe Connor, your CSM will reach out to you to discuss the options for your org.

Hope you found this helpful!

@Leilah.squires I can run the Android emulators fine on my M1 from Android Studio. What is limiting Bitrise from running them on M1s?

Hello and thanks for reaching out!

The limitation is currently with virtual machines. Since we utilize m1 virtual machines to run builds, nested virtualization is needed to run Android apps on an android emulator and at this time, there is not support for such instances.

Our recommendation would be either to build and test on our Linux stacks or using a product like Firebase for running tests.

Hope you found this helpful

Migration to M1 Mac has caused my builds to go from 20 minutes to over an hour, with a very high failure rate.

1 Like

Hi @Leilah.squires . That is really unfortunate news. We are also running our Android UI tests using the AVDManager step on Intel Macs.

1 Like