Does Ionic works fine on M1 Macbooks?

Hello,
Today my beloved intel i7 macbook pro 16 suddenly died, i already repaired it twice, its time to buy a new machine.
I was thinking of getting the M1 macbook pro 16, do you know if everything will work fine (xcode, android studio)?
Since I work a lot outside the office / house, my fear is buying a machine incompatible with all my current projects.

Thank you!

Yes! Ionic works well with M1. I used my iMac 2021 to run Apps on Android and iOS Devices using Live Reload. Sometimes Cocoa Pods makes some trouble on the installation Process. But there is a good workaround to install it without errors. All in all everything works great on M1.

Regards,
Marius

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thank you so much for sharing your experience.
Luckily and (again) suddenly, when I was slipping the macbook just turned on :smiley:
i will try to resist a little more and wait for a macbook m2 pro maybe :slight_smile:

grazie!

Hi Marius,

Could you please elaborate on the workaround you mentioned related to Cocoa Pods on the installation process? Or point me in the right direction? I seem to be running into this issue with an M1 MacBook - it hangs every time I try to build the app. Specifically, it gets stuck at “Updating iOS native dependencies with “pod install” (may take several minutes).”

Thank you so much!
Nolan

It can take more than 5 minutes,
this is the solution that worked for me:

. I fixed the ffi issue by uninstalling my faulty Ruby version and CocoaPods, then I used the -x86_64 arch to reinstall ffi and CocoaPods.

These are the steps I did to get back to a working state (and to apply the M1 workarounds for ffi):

  1. Uninstall Ruby with: brew uninstall ruby --force
  2. Uninstall CocoaPods. At first, try to list all CocoaPods versions / components with gem list --local | grep cocoapods. Then uninstall them one by one, in my case:

sudo gem uninstall cocoapods

sudo gem uninstall cocoapods-core

sudo gem uninstall cocoapods-downloader

etc.

  1. As a next step I was able to reinstall ffi and then CocoaPods with:

sudo arch -x86_64 gem install ffi

sudo arch -x86_64 gem install cocoapods

Once done, I could run pod install as expected.
(maybe you will need to run pod update before)

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For me, sudo arch -x86_64 gem install ffi didn’t work.

I ended up running the following (note that I am on a cloud Mac and I don’t have admin rights) (source):

gem install --user-install ffi -- --enable-libffi-alloc
gem install cocoapods --user-install

I believe this allows things to also stay with the M1 architecture and not emulate x86 too.

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This worked! Build time went from 3+ hours to just a few minutes. Thanks!

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For me, solution 1 of the following article worked well. Maybe it’ll be helpful for some people who come across this thread:

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