About

Your Mac was always enough.

MacOn puts the Mac on your desk in your pocket: a phone that sees and drives its screen, wakes and unlocks it, automates it, codes on it, and lets an AI operate it. It is a fast, free, private iOS CI runner too.

Why it exists

iOS CI is uniquely painful. Builds must run on macOS, code signing and provisioning profiles fight you, and every push waits in a queue behind metered, expensive build minutes.

Meanwhile, the fastest Mac in the room is often sitting right on your desk, idle. MacOn was built to close that gap: point it at a repository and it becomes the runner, with warm caches and zero queue.

The idea: use the right machine for each job

MacOn isn't here to replace hosted CI, it's here to sit alongside it. The setup that works best is a hybrid:

Run MacOn for everyday PR and test builds, instant and free on hardware you already own. Keep a hosted CI, or an always-on MacOn service, for release builds that need to run even when your laptop is closed. Neither one being down blocks you. And if your team lives in Bitbucket Pipelines, MacOn's second mode hosts a pool of self-hosted runners, so runs-on: macos steps land on your machine without changing a thing.

How it works

MacOn watches a Bitbucket or GitHub repository, a branch or open pull requests, via polling or instant webhooks. On each new commit it checks out the code, runs the pipeline defined in your repo's macon.yml, and reports status back. It builds any Apple platform and ships to TestFlight through your fastlane lanes.

It comes as a Mac app and a Homebrew CLI that share one core, so a pipeline runs identically whether you click a button or type macon watch. Set it up visually, export it, and run it headless on a server.

Then the project grew a remote

Watching builds from across the room turned into a full iPhone & iPad companion. Pair it once and it manages pipelines, tails logs, and, with permission, streams the Mac's screen and drives it: cursor, keyboard, a virtual trackpad, and a Stream Deck-style board. CompactOS opens a single Mac app fitted to your device so it reads like a phone app. And it can keep the Mac reachable, wake it from sleep, and unlock it, following the Mac automatically over iCloud when its address changes.

…and then the remote grew a brain

Once the phone could see and touch the Mac, the rest followed. Flows let you draw automations as clay blocks on swinging strings and run them on the Mac. A code workspace brought a file explorer, editor, real zsh terminals and Xcode builds to the couch. And an AI layer, chat with local Ollama models, voice conversations, an agent that reads the screen and drives the Mac step by approved step, turned the remote into a copilot. All of it optional, all of it bring-your-own-model, all of it off by default.

The companion is dressed as a soft 3D clay world, playful, tactile, re-skinnable across seventeen themes, and the Mac app and this site wear the same look. Useful shouldn't mean grey.

Open source

MacOn is an open-source project by Ali Haidar, born from a DevOps challenge and a stubborn belief that a developer's own Mac is more than capable of being their CI, and a fun thing to hold in your hand. The code, releases, and Homebrew tap all live on GitHub.

The team

AH

Ali Haidar

Creator & developer

Designed, built, and shipped it all: the Mac app, the macon CLI, and the companion.

>_

Claude Code

AI pair programmer

Anthropic's coding agent, a hands-on collaborator across the apps and this site.