Apple just made Docker Desktop optional on Mac.

And it is completely free.

This is apple/container. 26.5k stars no Github.

You can now run Linux containers natively on your Mac without installing Docker Desktop, without a background daemon hogging your RAM, and without paying $21 a month per developer for a commercial license.

Here is what it does:

→ Runs Linux containers as lightweight VMs directly on Apple Silicon using macOS 26 virtualization → Fully OCI compatible. Pull any image from Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry or anywhere else → Written in Swift and optimised specifically for Apple Silicon. Faster and lighter than anything Docker Desktop does on Mac → Standard container CLI syntax. If you know Docker commands you already know how to use this → Push images you build to any standard container registry and run them anywhere

Docker Desktop charges $21 per developer per month for commercial use. Apple’s version costs nothing and ships as open source under Apache-2.0.

Microsoft made Docker Desktop optional on Windows with WSL Containers last month.

Apple just did the same on Mac.

Docker is not going anywhere. But the era of paying for a GUI wrapper around containers on your own machine is quietly ending.

Repo here: http://github.com/apple/container

apple/container

Source: https://github.com/apple/container

 container

container is a tool that you can use to create and run Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines on your Mac. It’s written in Swift, and optimized for Apple silicon.

The tool consumes and produces OCI-compatible container images, so you can pull and run images from any standard container registry. You can push images that you build to those registries as well, and run the images in any other OCI-compatible application.

container uses the Containerization Swift package for low-level container, image, and process management.

Get started

Requirements

You need a Mac with Apple silicon to run container. To build it, see the BUILDING document.

container is supported on macOS 26, since it takes advantage of new features and enhancements to virtualization and networking in this release. We do not support older versions of macOS and the container maintainers typically will not address issues that cannot be reproduced on macOS 26.

Initial install

Download the latest signed installer package for container from the GitHub release page.

To install the tool, double-click the package file and follow the instructions. Enter your administrator password when prompted, to give the installer permission to place the installed files under /usr/local.

Start the system service with:

container system start

Upgrade or downgrade

For both upgrading and downgrading, you can manually download and install the signed installer package by following the steps from initial install or use the update-container.sh script (installed to /usr/local/bin).

If you’re upgrading or downgrading, you must stop your existing container:

container system stop

To upgrade to the latest release, simply run the command below:

/usr/local/bin/update-container.sh

To downgrade, you must uninstall your existing container (the -k flag keeps your user data, while -d removes it):

/usr/local/bin/uninstall-container.sh -k
/usr/local/bin/update-container.sh -v 0.3.0

Start the system service with:

container system start

Uninstall

Use the uninstall-container.sh script (installed to /usr/local/bin) to remove container from your system. To remove your user data along with the tool, run:

/usr/local/bin/uninstall-container.sh -d

To retain your user data so that it is available should you reinstall later, run:

/usr/local/bin/uninstall-container.sh -k

Next steps

• Take a guided tour of container by building, running, and publishing a simple web server image.
• Learn how to use various container features.
• Read a brief description and technical overview of container.
• Browse the full command reference.
• Build and run container on your own development system.
• View the project API documentation.

Contributing

Contributions to container are welcome and encouraged. Please see our main contributing guide for more information.

Project Status

The container project is currently under active development. Its stability, both for consuming the project as a Swift package and the container tool, is only guaranteed within patch versions, such as between 0.1.1 and 0.1.2. Minor version releases may include breaking changes until we reach a 1.0.0 release.