Mastering Mobile Test Automation

Chapter 4. Emulators and Simulators – the Automation of Emulated Devices

An emulator is software that mimics the complete behavior of any other software and has the same or similar code to execute, whereas a simulator just replicates the behavior in an external sense. That is why we have flight simulators and not flight emulators. However, this distinction is more academic than practical since Google provides Android emulators, whereas Apple prefers to call their iOS ones simulators, even when both of them perform roughly the exact same function. For better readability, we'll refer to all iOS ones as simulators, and for rest of them, we will use the term emulators.

When generally speaking, though, we prefer to call this technique emulator-based, ...