Building an iOS App for the Simulator

Although it is strongly recommended to test an app on real devices, some developers might want to quickly test their apps on a simulator. Below are the steps you can follow to build your iOS app to run on the iOS Simulator through XCode and the command-line.

XCode workflow - building Simulator app

1. Select a iOS simulator target for the project inside XCode.

2. Select the .app file under Products and choose to "Show in Finder" to get the file.

Alternately, you can also navigate to the output folder, which should be located at this location.

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/<project-name>/Build/Products/<configuration-device>

3. Compress the .app folder to create an archived zip file.

You can now upload this zip file to MoQuality for recording tests.

Command line workflow - building Simulator app

Go into the directory containing your XCode project and use xcodebuild to build the app.

xcodebuild -sdk iphonesimulator -configuration Debug

Then zip the .app bundle in  build/Debug-iphonesimulator/

zip -r UIKitCatalog.zip UIKitCatalog.app