Sure, there are loads of independent developers and that's great and tooling should work for them.
The majority of the top 100 native iOS apps are developed by teams of people working together. Apple unnecessarily makes it difficult for that group, which creates a barrier to entry for more sophisticated app development which is bad for the ecosystem.
The top 100 are those classical 100 people team for a message app kind of companies, hardly the target market of this feature, they already have their DevOps pipeline using Terraform with K8s on Kata Containers, and immutable builds that scale across the cluster.
Right, which is the point of the post I originally replied to and also my point. They cannot use that DevOps pipeline to build iOS apps, sign iOS apps or deploy to the Apple App Store.
Shopify detailed the hoops they had to jump through a few years back (https://shopify.engineering/scaling-ios-ci-with-anka) where they specifically say that CI for iOS has to be done entirely differently to the rest of their infrastructure:
It’s the only piece of infrastructure at Shopify that doesn’t run on top of Linux. We can leverage the same Google Cloud infrastructure we already use in production for our Android build nodes. Unfortunately, Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) don’t provide infrastructure that can run macOS.
You benefit from using these tools almost immediately when you're >1 developer and that's where XCode Cloud may be helpful, the 1-5 developer team size. But you're still in trouble if you are using something like React Native/Flutter/Kotlin to build iOS and Android apps and don't want to maintain separate CI processes.
Not everyone needs 100 team members for a messaging app.