As you probably know, Apple is running WWDC 25, and yesterday there were a lot of exciting announcements. Among these, aside from the OS updates, Apple announced “container” and containerization support for macOS 26.
Here are the key features:
- Manage OCI images
- Interact with remote registries
- Create and populate ext4 file systems
- Interact with the Netlink socket family
- Create an optimized Linux kernel for fast boot times
- Spawn lightweight virtual machines
- Manage the runtime environment of virtual machines
- Spawn and interact with containerized processes
- Use Rosetta 2 for executing x86_64 processes on Apple silicon
In fact, the “container” client will be able to spawn a lightweight VM with an optimized Linux kernel and small rootFS, where you can run Linux containers using Rosetta 2 for executing x86 instructions.
The interesting part from a security perspective is that every container will run isolated inside its own lightweight VM.
This announcement is interesting and could be a valuable alternative for developers compared to the usual Docker Desktop (which is free only for personal use) and Podman/Podman Desktop (free and open source).
Software requirements:
- macOS 15 or newer and Xcode 26 Beta
- macOS 26 Beta 1 or newer
Hardware requirement:
- Apple silicon CPU
You can find the two related GitHub repositories below, with license Apache 2.0: