The majority of teams that use MacStadium run their tests on Apple’s Xcode simulator. Simulators are software that simulates only the OS that would be running on a given device, with no attention paid to the underlying internals of a given device. These teams generally use a simulator instead. In the end, we find that most teams who are focused exclusively on iOS CI choose to forego the extended build times that an emulator brings. The challenge inherent in using emulators is that they may not offer an identical emulation of every device your team is targeting.Īdditionally, although the overhead for running tests on emulators is significantly less than that it would be on physical devices, there is still significantly greater overhead to run emulator processes as compared to simulator processes, which translates into longer build times – often viewed as the arch-enemy of modern DevOps. The real advantage of an emulator for mobile CI is that an entire bank of real devices can be emulated with a high degree of confidence and relatively little overhead, as compared to builds executed on physical devices.

Basically, it emulates the device and the OS. EmulatorsĮmulators are software that emulates the operating system that would be running on a given handset, and the code that emulates the internals of the device itself. Challenges of Physical Devices for Mobile CIĪs enticing as this aforementioned certainty is, this is often an elusive target, as there is an enormous number of phones on the market, and maintaining a working set of devices that is representative of that variety is no small feat. The advantage of testing on physical devices is bulletproof confidence of an application’s performance on a given device. Advantages of Physical Devices for Mobile CI This is largely because of the many nuances inherent in not only the performance of the OS on the phone, but also within the internals of the device itself. It is considered best practice to test applications on physical handsets before release. However, as MacStadium works with teams facing this very challenge, we have discovered a few insights that may help your team to navigate the ins and outs of this question.

In the end, the answer to the question we posed in the title will be inextricably linked to the particulars of your operation.

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