[a1o]

Wtf?? The iOS Simulator is a joke, it doesn't remotely reproduce a real iOS Device. The permissions work differently and the graphics of it are very different too - profiling has to be on a real device!

You can load images that represent Android devices in the Android Simulator and reproduce bugs that exist on the device.

I work with both and the Android simulation allows you to go further - which is good since the diversity of devices is bigger.

Both still sucks in the end and you should test on a real device. This is particularly painful because usually the devices you don't use frequently you simply don't charge, so you kinda want to prepare to charge the devices before. You can still plug and run the app while charging but it may give a throttled experience - which when profiling games may slight alter the results (a flashdrive read bottleneck may disappear when comparing to CPU one).

[manmal]

Still, there‘s _usually_ no need to test an app on more than 1-2 physical devices. If it were a requirement to test an app on every device, then Android developers would be quite screwed.

Some exceptions exist, like medical apps or apps that rely a lot on continuous operation (I recently worked on an OBD app that allows drivers to gather their trip data, and it needed to continuously run in the background - you wouldn’t believe how hard Android manufacturers make this).

[a1o]

Medical apps are true high requirements yes - specially when interacting with other devices. But also games, depending on what you are doing, you definitely want to be testing on multiple devices, specifically if you are pushing the hardware in some way performance wise. When building game engines you will also be getting different reports with different qualities from other developers, and having real devices really speeds up reproducing issues.

[jwells89]

I’ve had no trouble with Simulator, but the run down battery bit is indeed a problem. It’d be nice if one could get ahold of versions of phones/tablets that have a dummy battery that presents itself as fully charged when plugged in. No point in burning through lithium cycles on test devices.

[a1o]

A version that would run without batteries would be super sweet! I understand such dev-kit for phones/tablets may not benefit from economy of scale and may be expensive but it would be nice to have the option. They could be built to be stackable, so you put them in a furniture or maybe even in a rack of devices. But once you are developing for phones and tablets and you have one device on each system version, different sizes and all, it gets really boring getting each of the drawer and charging and testing and all. Once in a while I see some offer of a platform that has these things remotely accessible through as a service, but it's not the same as having the devices available for real touch.