Native apps

For web projects a container is enough. Mobile apps need emulators, and emulators need virtualisation.

Android: on the server

Android emulators run on Linux but need hardware virtualisation (KVM) to be usably fast. Hatchery can pass the /dev/kvm device into a drone:

hatchery spawn levino/some-app --kvm

The emulator then runs right inside the drone, and the agent can build, install and test the app like any other process. This is deliberately opt-in, because almost no drone needs it.

iOS: level 2

iOS apps can only be built and tested in the simulator on macOS – Apple’s rule. For that I run a macOS VM on my Mac Studio with Xcode, the simulator and xcodebuild, which an agent reaches via SSH. It has its own narrowly scoped access, just like a drone.

It’s hand-built and not automated by Hatchery. macOS VMs can’t do nested virtualisation, so there’s no Docker inside either. For this setup it’s a side note: it shows that the principle (own environment, own identity, agent may do anything inside) carries beyond Linux containers.