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iosios-simulator
Vinicius Gualberto
Vinicius Gualberto

Reputation: 639

The iOS Simulator is a Virtual Machine or a Emulator?

The iOS simulador that installs with Xcode is a VM or a emulator like Android does?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 3951

Answers (1)

Midhun MP
Midhun MP

Reputation: 107121

It's neither a Virtual Machine nor an Emulator. It's a simulator, in another words it's a standard mac application which mimic the behaviour of iOS devices. It mimics most of the features of an actual devices, but lacks some major features. So you need to use a real device for testing some of the real world scenarios.

You can read more about simulators here : About Simulator

I would like to quote some key information from the above linked page:

What is Simulator

Simulator allows you to rapidly prototype and test builds of your app during the development process. Installed as part of the Xcode tools, Simulator runs on your Mac and behaves like a standard Mac app while simulating an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Apple TV environment. Think of the simulator as a preliminary testing tool to use before testing your app on an actual device.

Need of actual device for Testing

Simulator is a useful tool, but it should not be the only way you test an app. Because the simulator is an app running on a Mac, it has access to the computer’s resources, including the CPU, memory, and network connection. All of these resources are likely to be faster than those found on a mobile device. As a result, the simulator is not an accurate test of an app’s performance, memory usage, and networking speed. For this same reason, always test the performance of your app’s user interface on a device. In Simulator, your app’s user interface may appear to run both faster and smoother than on a device.

Also keep in mind that some user interface elements can be easier to interact with in Simulator using a mouse than when trying to interact with the app through touch on a device.

Finally, there are some hardware and API differences in Simulator. These differences may affect your app when testing in Simulator.

Upvotes: 12

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