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It certainly doesn’t hurt that the simulator only needs to run the iOS front end on top of macOS Darwin instead of a full copy of iOS, though. Couldn’t somethi

• monocasa 8y ago
  There's a lot of Android specific kernel interfaces that'd have to be added to the desktop. Stuff like the binder IPC. It's doable, but work.
• saagarjha 8y ago
  > It certainly doesn’t hurt that the simulator only needs to run the iOS front end on top of macOS Darwin instead of a full copy of iOS, though. Uh, no. The simulator literally boots an entire copy of iOS, with its own libraries, frameworks, and utilities, that's entirely separate from the host OS.
  • Reason077 8y ago
    That is incorrect. The iOS simulator is not a virtualized environment. It's not running it's own kernel etc, rather it's just a set of iOS libraries and frameworks built for x86 and a thin compatibility layer so that they run on macOS. You can actually see your running iOS applications, and all of the iOS daemons etc show up as first class processes on you Mac if you run "ps". iOS apps running in the simulator are not separate from the host OS at all - they're running on the host OS, just like any other process. Try killing "Springboard" from your Mac command line and watch what happens inside the simulator...