Xcode Cloud Feedback from leboncoin
Article Summary
Pierre Abi-aad from leboncoin took Xcode Cloud for a test drive with a 28-developer iOS team. His verdict? Not ready for complex architectures, but Apple's onto something.
leboncoin runs an in-house CI/CD with 20 Mac minis serving 28 iOS developers across a modular codebase. When Xcode Cloud beta arrived, they tested it on a greenfield macOS tooling app to evaluate if Apple's managed solution could replace their infrastructure without risking production.
Key Takeaways
- Tested Xcode Cloud on side project to avoid risking complex production architecture
- Smart workflow design: only run unit tests on modified Swift packages per PR
- External dependencies reinstall every pipeline, significantly increasing build times
- Workflow configuration in Xcode works well but lacks yaml-based versioning
- Verdict: great for indies and startups, not ready for architecturally complex apps
Xcode Cloud shows promise as a turnkey CI/CD solution for smaller teams, but compute costs and architectural limitations make it impractical for complex, modular codebases like leboncoin's.
About This Article
leboncoin's 28-person iOS team needed to test whether Xcode Cloud would work for them. The challenge was doing this without disrupting their complex production architecture, which infrastructure developers actively manage alongside ongoing iOS, Xcode, and macOS updates.
Pierre Abi-aad's team built a greenfield macOS tooling application using Swift packages. This isolated testing ground let them experiment with Xcode Cloud workflows and set up conditional file-change triggers without touching production code.
The team found that Xcode Cloud reinstalls external dependencies on every pipeline action, which significantly slowed throughput times. This works fine for independent developers and startups, but architecturally complex applications need better performance optimization than Xcode Cloud currently provides.