🤖 Simulators

Testing our applications on simulators!

Android Emulator

To run the Expo app on an android virtual device, we need to have Android Studio installed first. Follow the steps mentioned here to install Android Studio to your laptop. Follow the steps mentioned to create a virtual device to emulate an android device.

Once everything is installed, you can run the emulator, and start the virtual device, on the terminal where we started the expo app, we can type a for android, so that our expo app loads onto the virtual device that we just created. The same can be done via the expo dev webpage.

iOS Simulator

The basic requirement to develop iOS applications is to have a MacBook or any other Apple computer. To run the Expo app on an iOS simulator, we need to install Xcode from the App Store. We can then follow the instructions mentioned on the Expo website.

In addition, we need to select the Command Line Tools under the Locations tab within Xcode's preferences. Once done, we can then click on Xcode on the menu bar, select Open Developer Tool and then select Simulator.

Now, to run our expo application on this iOS simulator, we can simply type i on the terminal where we start the expo script. Alternatively, we can also start the app on the iOS simulator via the expo dev webpage.