Mobile Testing: Simulators and Emulators

Mobile Testing: Simulators and Emulators.

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In today’s Blog Post, we’ll discuss mobile testing a bit deeper.

Market research shows that the use of mobile devices is growing and will soon save this state. What does this mean for the QA Engineer? This means QA Engineers should continue to prioritise testing mobile applications and learn more each day since informational technologies are changing daily and progressing extensively from year to year.

Testing of mobile applications can be done in a few ways:

• Testing on an actual device.
• Testing on a simulator.
• Testing on an emulator.

But what’s the difference between Mobile Testing: Simulators and Emulators?

While you can assume that a real device is a physical device you keep in your pocket and can access by yourself directly, there’s a slight difference between a simulator and an emulator. In a nutshell, a simulator mimics the behaviour of the OS and replicates its environment but not the hardware. Meanwhile, the emulator creates the virtual device and replicates the software and hardware. The simulator provides an essential representation of the OS and isn’t precise regarding memory usage, CPU architecture, or other hardware features (e.g., camera, gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS, battery, etc.). Emulator makes testing the hardware features more accessible since it can replicate them. The simulator shows the UI (user interface), and the emulator – combines the software and hardware. This means that the emulator could be slower since it renders UI and combines it with hardware.

Also, the simulator doesn’t run native code, while the emulator – does it. This means the simulator lacks running, e.g., ARM (Advanced RISK Machine) architecture code. While software developers and Quality Assurance Engineers could use different IDEs (integrated development environments), the most common for mobile app development are Xcode (iOS) and Android Studio (Android). Xcode provides simulators and Android Studio emulators.

So, what to choose?

First of all, first things first: always test your mobile application on real devices. From a previous Blog Post at Buggram, we already know that mobile devices are very different (OS, UI, screen resolution, etc.) – you can recall it here: Mobile Applications Testing vs. Web Applications Testing.

Secondly, remember that an emulator provides a software and hardware combination that is closer to the physical mobile device than a simulator, which generally shows only the mobile device’s UI without linking to the hardware.

Thirdly, while testing Xcode, the QA Engineer uses a simulator, and Android Studio uses an emulator.

Did you find these points helpful? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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