Bitrise Build Hub - GitHub Actions runners that build 2x faster for your agents
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Coding agents push more code, so your CI runs more builds than ever. GitHub's runners are slow, so every extra build sits in the queue and your team waits with it. Bitrise Build Hub runs those builds on the newest Apple Silicon and high-core Linux instead: 54% faster on iOS, 31% on Android.
PRs come back in minutes, and your app ships sooner. You keep GitHub Actions. Changing one line in your workflow is all it takes to run on the best runners made for mobile.
Replies
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.
Congrats on the new product! Is it different from Remote Dev Environments that you pushed live last week?
@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.
@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 :)
Hey 👋 I'm Catherine, I handle product marketing for Bitrise Build Hub.
More and more teams are getting moved onto GitHub Actions, and it's rarely the team's own call, it's decided higher up. Fine in most cases, but mobile teams get overlooked even though they have the most demanding needs: fast Apple silicon, the newest Xcode, an environment set up properly for iOS and Android, which general-purpose runners aren't built for.
So, we made Build Hub. A one line swap (runs-on: macos-latest becomes runs-on: bitrise-m4-pro) and your pipeline runs on machines built for mobile CI/CD.
Our engineers decked out our data centres and built the machines and stacks themselves, tuned for mobile specifically. And it's not just a point solution, Bitrise is an established mobile DevOps platform 🧩(we first launched on Product Hunt in 2014!), so you can add our co-located Build Cache for builds up to 90% faster, and let Release Management ship them to the app stores.
Hello from Hungary! 👋 🇭🇺 I’m Julie from Bitrise (engineer and tech lead).
Working on a new product is always a special treat to me. I love ideating, researching, and working closely with the first few beta customers. My favourite challenge of Build Hub so far has been the scaling algorithm that we use for starting the virtual machines where the builds can run - starting these too early would waste resources, and starting these too late would cause queues for the users. I like the challenge of finding a fine balance between the two.
I’m excited to see Bitrise Build Hub on ProductHunt. Let’s make the fun begin!
@julia_fodor_horvath Thanks for making Build Hub so awesome!
Thanks, @lisadziuba!
As I appreciate your praise I would like to double on the fact that there is a whole team behind Build Hub, without any of us Build Hub wouldn't be at the place where it is now.
@julia_fodor_horvath You cook good!
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?
@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.
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.
@davitausberlin amazing question :) We actually saw 161x is the growth in AI-attributed builds, so your question is spot on
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 🙂
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?
@djoragui Thanks for checking our products. Love to see you here again. Let me pin my tech team to follow up :)
@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.
@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 👀
@catherine_doyle Thanks for the heads up! Great to see Bitrise leading in this area
Hey to everyone on Product Hunt! I’m Otto from Bitrise.
I worked on most of the API layer, the runner integration and the orchestration underneath. The part I'm proudest of is the one nobody sees: we cut VM start time by more than 60%.
That sounds small until you remember every single build pays it before any of your code runs! Launching is a strange feeling, you never really know if you found all the edges. So if something behaves oddly for you today, tell me here and I'll look at it 🐛
I love working on Build Hub because the need is so real, and I'd rather show you than just tell you it's faster. We're running a speed challenge this week: point your slowest build and share the before and after in the comments to our launch. Biggest improvements wins Bitrise kitty(Purr-request) swag 🐱. Start a free 14-day Build Hub trial to take part 🙂
So, what build has been ruining your afternoons? 👀
@catherine_doyle How to take part? Do I need to send you some proof?
@catherine_doyle Can it be a personal app, not a work project?
@adiatlov hey! sure, it can be personal app, here's how it works:
First sign up for a 14-day Build Hub free trial then:
Point your slowest GitHub Actions workflow at Build Hub
Email us at buildhub@bitrise.io with two screenshots of your GitHub Action completed job pages. One screen shot of the before and one after you switch to build hub. (please ensure the successful jobs’ build times are visible in both screenshots)
Good luck 🐱
@catherine_doyle Prrr
Awesome work, congrats for the launch! 🚀🚀🚀
@szabolcs_gelencser Thank you!
@szabolcs_gelencser thank you, much appreciated
What is the next gamechanger feature that will arrive at Build Hub? How will it change our ways of working?
@szabolcs_gelencser We are preparing enhanced visibility features which would increase transparency and observability. You wouldn’t need to think about why things take time or didn’t happen, you will get actionable feedback about misconfigurations or other types of issues.