Mobile Emulators & Simulators: The Ultimate Guide

45 thoughts on “Mobile Emulators & Simulators: The Ultimate Guide”

1. Great work!! Do you know any iPhone simulator for Windows?

2. Awesome resource list. What about test frameworks that give you remote access to REAL devices? Keynote’s MDPI and Device Anywhere for example.

3. Thanks Steve! I’m planning a post about remote labs, like DeviceAnywhere, there are at least five remote labs, including two free ones.

   I believe that for the first testing or the while-developing testing, emulators & simulators are a better & simpler solutions. I agree that they are not as great as mobile remote labs for final real testing.

   Performance and WPO are a challenge with emulators, remote labs and real devices. I will talk about that soon; maybe on next Velocity? ;-)

   @ Steve Souders

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5. The Qt Simulator (as included in the Nokia Qt SDK) does not require any login. Otherwise a good and comprehensive list.

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9. Do you know a ‘online’ Blackberry browser emulator ? like the Opera mini demo ? http://demo.opera-mini.net/

10. You are missing Firefox Mobile http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/download/. available for win,mac,lin.

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12. @Joseph: I’m not sure about Blackberry emulators, but the Mini demo you link to seems to not be official, and is an older version of Mini. The Opera 5 official version is http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/ and the older version (Opera Mini 4.2)is http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/?ver=4

13. BlackBerry Simulators are placed here: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/resources/simulators.jsp

14. I didn’t find microemulator for javame here
    http://www.microemu.org/
    It’s “resizable” skin is very useful in testing scalable interfaces

15. Thanks for all the comments and broken link reports! I’ve updated links and added Windows Phone 7 and Firefox Mobile to the list.

16. The nice thing about the webOS emulator is that it features a host mode, which allows you to run apps, including the web browser app, in your favorite webkit-based desktop browser. Since the webOS browser is very similar to the browsers shipped with iOS and Android, you can do mobile web development for the three platforms using traditional desktop web development debug tools, such as the webkit inspector included with Google Chrome.

17. Great work on putting this list together. Very helpful!

    I would like to add one emulator/simulator for your consideration.

    the Ripple emulator, tailored for HTML5 mobile apps, specifically for PhoneGap, WAC, and the mobile Web. Ripple runs in the browser as an extension and is a very light install.

    http://ripple.tinyhippos.com

    You can see some short demo videos here:

    http://youtube.com/tinyhippos

    Thanks again for the great content :-)

18. For any ipod development on a windows machine you would have to emulate mac then install the iphone sdk i doubt apple will ever make it available for windows

19. FYI, the WAC emulator is now at http://www.wacapps.net/web/portal/sdk and no longer requires a login.
    (the existing link still works)

20. Is any Iphone simulator for windows??

21. can i get the emulator for blackberry without login??

22. I’m looking for something I can put up on a website so visitors can enter their web address and see how it will appear on a mobile phone. Can you suggest what the best way to go about that is?

    Thanks

    Rowena

23. Ref Rowena’s question.

    I am also looking for a proper web based simulator. EVRRY one I have looked only shows the top corner of the full web page, not the full page width (with no scrolling), as it would be in a smart phone (before the user manually zooms or scrolls).

    Any suggestions would be appreciated.

    ColinK

24. I support some internal corporate applications, and we have recently developed a custom app for ipad, which has integrations into other internal tools, etc, hopefully allowing our sales people to be more productive while mobile.

    As it relates to support, I’m looking to substitute an emulator for actual iPads for my team-members.

    My question is can these emulators download and run apps from the app store like an actual device? The comments and examples all seem to be regarding emulating a website via safari.

25. Actually, there are some simulators for the iOS devices’ WebKit around, but none of the ones I have seen so far (not even Apple’s one, to date by far the best of the lot) is entirely satisfactory.

    Assuming a Windows host, there is a mostly workable “iOS Web Browser Simulator” (derived from an earlier AIR application called iBBdemo2) which can be found at http://electricplum.com/products.html – I have tried only the Light (freeware) version, though.

    Another extremely interesting project is iEmu, an in-progress variant of the well-known QEMU engine aiming to run the full iOS firmware; its status can be tracked at the http://www.iemu.org/index.php/IEmu_Development_Status URI.

26. Good job for all the post.
    Is there any emulator for Samsung Galaxy S+, I am testing between the S and the S+

27. The Android Emulator has Versions 3.1, 3.2, and 4.0 now

28. Hi,

    We have developed an online mobile emulator that enables you to test the display of any website in many cell phones.

    Most of settings are honored : dimensions, resolutions, user agent, behavior, features…

    Don’t hesitate. It’s free !!!

    Colin.

29. very well done with your research, i am however curious as to whether you have actually used all of these emulators? or is this just purely research as to what exactly is available? with no reviews??

    really interested, if you have another post regarding the quality of these emulators / simulators, please let me know?

    thanks Paul

30. Paul, I’ve used and tried every emulator. There is a full review in my book Programming the Mobile Web; in fact, it’s a whole chapter

31. Nice list there but I’ve managed to get a browser running in the Bada Emulator which allows you to directly test web sites/applications.

32. Hi Ian, can you share with us how did you managed to get a browser running in the Bada Emulator?

33. @Thapelo Makhoba
    If you have VirtualBox, the latest version of OS X I could find is OS X 10.7.3, and it is very hard, if not impossible, to upgrade to 10.7.4 to run Xcode without the upgrade completely failing.

    If you have the free version of VMWare, you need to buy the full version of it in order to start your Mac VM. I found OS X 10.7.4 for VMWare, which is what the next-to-most recent version of Xcode needs to run.

    If you bought the full version of VMWare, all you need is the OS X 10.7.4 file that I found and you should be all set. Just follow the instructions in the video at this link, though. People who didn’t have been known to screw up the VM in many ways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWivc2XcpP8

    Hope this helps!

34. thank you Max (and numerous contributors). Any thoughts about browserstack.com? How do they fit into the picture?

35. Lee, BrowserStack is a cloud-based service where you can use this same emulators remotely

36. Is there any emulators other than Windows Emulator for Windows OS Mobile testing?

37. Hi,
    First let me say that I’m purchasing both books today and look forward to reading. Secondly, I work for a large retailer that launched our mobile site in 2011 and we are struggling with testing the site hence the emulator research. If you had to pick one emulator out of your list, what would be your first top 3 choices?

38. Mary, usually with emulators you don’t have a choice. You pick the ones you need based on your current target group; for example, if you are retailer you can check stats on your own country at http://gs.statcounter.com and decide which emulator do you need.

39. Thank you for your quick response. At this time US is splitting the market with mobile devices almost equal – iphone (43%) & android (39%) and I’ve been reviewing tools to help me QA our mobile website and I haven’t found any that really emulate all the functionality on our site. Example: many emulators do not support rotating primary or alt images. I was hoping that you could reduce the downloads by providing me with your top 3 choices that would support testing for android devices and iOS.

40. Hi – thanks for a great resource.

    We are looking for a Windows Mobile emulator but we are running all development machines in Win 7 64 bit and cannot find an emulator that will work. Any ideas that would help? We would even be willing buy one if we could find it.

41. Great post and the discussions are informative too. I am new to mobile web testing and have been looking info difference in javascript engine that I will see in a emulator vs real device? how does jquery behave on a emulator vs real device? We are just launching a mobile version of our website which uses HTML/CSS/Javascript. If you have any insight please let me know. Thanks.

42. You might like to add the Firefox OS Simulator (browser plugin).
    http://people.mozilla.com/~myk/r2d2b2g/

    It’s currently a prototype but it is functional.

43. Nokia has Remote Device Access via the developer.nokia.com site. An account is required, but you can remotely test on various real MeeGo, Series 40, Symbian and Windows Phone 8 devices. You might also want to mention that Microsoft has a WP8 emulator via the current SDK 8.

44. Could you please use lowercase in your table? It’s completely unreadable. With all respect to your work.

45. Hi @Vadim, thanks for your feedback. You are totally right; In fact in the HTML I’m not using uppercase; it seems a WordPress theme update has changed the CSS and forced uppercase there :S Thanks for sending a notice; I’ll fix it. Anyway, I’m planning to move this table to a new website soon with a totally new design.