The Wikipedia iOS app's build and its 503 unit tests took a median 922 seconds (15.4 minutes) on GitHub's standard macos-26 runner, an Apple M1 with 3 vCPU. The same job, with the same Xcode, simulator and xcodebuild commands, took a median 337 seconds (5.6 minutes) on a Bitrise Build Hub M4 Large with 5 vCPU. That is 2.7 times faster, over 17 runs on each side, every run cold.

In our first article this was one row in a pipeline benchmark. Here we look only at the iOS job: which phase gets faster, what a run costs at list price, whether a bigger Mac helps, and what you change in a workflow to move it.

The-DevOps-Daily/gha-runner-benchmark on GitHub

TLDR

The build gained the most minutes: 538 s on the M1 against 145 s on the M4 Large (3.7x).…