Apple Container as a backend for Docker Desktop on macOS 26?

So, Apple are finally adding native support for containers to macOS. It will allow containers to run directly on top of the OS instead of requiring a VM with the Linux kernel as a workaround. See: GitHub - apple/container: A tool for creating and running Linux containers using lightweight virtual machines on a Mac. It is written in Swift, and optimized for Apple silicon.

Does anyone know if there are already any discussions about using Apple Container as an alternative backend for Docker Desktop? On Windows, Docker Desktop already provides different backend options, such as Hyper-V and WSL. It seems to me that the natural evolution for Docker Desktop on macOS should be to offer Apple Container as an alternative backend as well.

What do you all think?

There is no such thing as apple container in the sense you suggested. As you can see in the title of the linked repository, it is about Linux containers and that means a Linux kernel is needed and it is just another kind of “light way virtual machine”.

All I can say is that Docker is aware of what Apple made and I’m sure if they see it is better in some way than the alternatives in Docker Desktop, they will make it available in Docker Desktop, but as far as I know, the focus is currently on Docker’s own backend, called Docker VMM. That is what they can optimize the most fo Docker Desktop.

You cans till ask for supporting Apple’s solution in the Roadmap

Share what you think about that, what feature you miss in already existing ones or what Apple solved regarding performance or stability. The best would be if Apple and Docker could work together to get the most out of both solutions. WSL on Windows allowed Docker to use NVidia GPUs, so I can imagine similar benefits, but I don’t know about any specifc plan. The roadmap is the bets way to ask for this.

update:

I haven’t checked now, but I heard that Apple’s isolation is different too and while Docker Desktop runs a single VM for all the containers, Apple runs a light weight VM for each container. Again, I haven’t checked, so I could be completely wrong.

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