Speed boost to Flipper debugger on Apple M1

TL;DR Download the Apple silicon builds of Flipper here: https://github.com/chiragramani/FlipperReleases/releases

Flipper's official builds are painfully slow on Apple M1 silicon.

The app was so slow that it hindered my daily work. And the worst bit was that not only my CPU was struggling with the Flipper but it also made an iOS app I was working on painfully slow too!

Intel inside

It turned out that Flipper has been running through Rosetta emulator.

Universal build to the rescue

Thankfully there are good people out there that prepared a Universal App build for Flipper that runs natively on M1 silicon to a great success.

Here's the PR https://github.com/facebook/flipper/pull/3553 for a reference.

Installation

UPDATE: the para-official builds are now available at https://github.com/chiragramani/FlipperReleases/releases

Build M1 silicon-ready Flipper app by running below on your Terminal:

git clone https://github.com/aarongrider/flipper.git
cd flipper
git checkout m1-universal
cd desktop
yarn
yarn build --mac

Your Apple binary will be at ../dist/mac-universal/Flipper.app.

Run it by double clicking it in the Finder and you'll immediately see that Flipper and most importantly an app you're developing runs much faster now.

You can be happy about your M1 machine again.