4 ms·
That explains the difference, but what's the purpose?
by RussianCow 28d ago
That explains the difference, but what's the purpose?
- a012 28d agoYou can test your application, game, website without a physical phone?
- leoh 28d agoCan do that with the simulator too
- refulgentis 28d agoRunning on ported userspace components, with a shim, isn't the same as running on the OS in itself. That really matters, sometimes. But not the vast majority of the time. (source: been coding iOS since pre-SDK iPhone OS 1.0)
- RussianCow 28d agoCan you give some examples of where it matters? I'm genuinely curious.
- bradfitz 28d agoLast I checked, VPN network extensions wouldn't run in the simulator.
- afavour 28d agoIt’s been years but I ran into a problem with a notification extension years ago. Worked fine on simulator, not on device. Turned out it was because I was using a HEIF image and (I think) the on-device extension was trying to use hardware decoding and didn’t have access to it. Meanwhile the simulator had no such sandboxing restrictions. The difference doesn’t matter until it does, and then it’s infuriating to work out what’s going on.
- gitgud 27d ago> The difference doesn’t matter until it does, and then it’s infuriating to work out what’s going on. I love this quote, reminds me how annoying it can be when something isn’t reproducible locally… only in production…
- DonHopkins 28d agoTesting AR apps, or any app that relies on hardware you can't simulate easily. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T43b5ywnYpo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T43b5ywnYpo
- dingdongditchme 28d agoIs the simulator faster than this? I would suspect so.
- cfn 28d agoI have had instances where the app runs fine on the simulator but crashes on the device. This might solve that.
- leoh 28d agoIf functional, you can download apps from the App Store, sign in to iCloud.. probably do a bunch of agentic stuff as if you had a real device
- Sajarin 28d agoLooks like apple services compatibility is not currently supported for this [0] [0] https://github.com/Lakr233/vphone-cli/discussions/175 https://github.com/Lakr233/vphone-cli/discussions/175
- discordance 28d agoIf you read a bit further, there's a jailbroken variant that has Sileo and Trollstore installed, so you can run whatever IPAs
- QuantumNomad_ 28d agoWhere? Edit: ah now I see, in the main readme under heading Firmware Variants. https://github.com/Lakr233/vphone-cli#firmware-variants https://github.com/Lakr233/vphone-cli#firmware-variants
- rvz 28d agoExactly. It means it cannot download apps from the App Store or use Apple services and Apple knows this deliberate limitation.
- VladVladikoff 28d agoSpam. Click farms. Etc.
- trollbridge 28d agoIt would also make testing far easier. I got bit with something that failed on real life iPhones with language set to es_US that worked fine on the simulator.
- trueno 28d agooh. is this why icloud spam texts are running wild now
- greggsy 28d agoNo, it’s just trivial to generate iCloud email addresses that won’t get picked up by spam filter.
- whynotmaybe 28d agoThe simulator doesn't have a camera. The android emulator allows to configure the camera and use a picture, it's very handy to test your qr/barcode reader without needing to use a physical device. Maybe this also allows to use an image as camera?
- gcampos 28d agoYou cannot run Network Extensions on the simulator
- landr0id 28d agoIt's useful for security research since you can do kernel debugging and inspection of the device not possible in the simulator. As others pointed out it's also useful for e.g. click/spam farms which need a "real" iPhone.