Show HN: Run dedicated iOS Simulators in the browser

by weiyin • 12 years ago

147 67 12 years ago

weiyin15• 12 years ago

Hi, thanks for checking us out. We're happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Some of you may be familiar with app.io's demo pages service which was discontinued in August. We loved using their service and we thought it'd be a blast building a replacement.

Technologies used: node, socket.io, mongodb, html5 canvas

B-n-c5• 12 years ago

I understand those are the web technologies, but how is this being run in the back? Tons of mac servers, with multiple IOS simulators on each? One running per user on the mac? Custom software to control and pass through to the socket?

Care to shed any light as to an overview on how the backend works? I've always been curious since I first saw App.io

13• 12 years ago

Tons of mac servers, with multiple IOS simulators on each?

Maybe a modified iOS Simulator binary that can run hundreds of instances on a single powerful server, would be my best bet.

weiyin15• 12 years ago

Hey B-n-c, You are pretty much spot on with everything you mentioned.

Apparently app.io had some setup w/ VMs running on lightweight hypervisors (https://macstadium.com/casestudies), but we found we didn't have to have all that overhead to run multiple simulators per machine.

And you're exactly right about the small piece of custom code to pass controls and send frames. We're big fans of socket.io - pretty powerful stuff!

Happy to answer follow-ups if we missed something.

Thanks, weiyin

daveytea• 12 years ago

As previously the Head of BD at App.io, I applaud your efforts! Well done! Quite a few ways you can monetise, good luck! :)

chrisnolet5• 12 years ago

Likewise!! Well done guys. Great to see you've grabbed the torch. Good luck and I look forward to following your progress.

MichaelApproved• 12 years ago

More information about what the site does would be helpful. Also, I get this error on Firefox/Windows "no video with supported format and mime type found"

Edit: also click on the demo and saw the simulator but couldn't get it to do anything. What is supposed to happen in the simulator? Should I be able to click on something? Any instructions/information would be helpful. Right now you're assuming everyone knows what the site is about and what the simulator is supposed to do.

ironcrucible• 12 years ago

I had the same issue, using Firefox 33 on Windows 8.1. It looks like switching to Chrome fixed the demo. Would be nice to have some sort of notice that certain browsers aren't supported (if that's the case).

Also, fonts are rendering poorly in Firefox and Chrome [0]. Bumping the font-weight up to at least 400 makes the text much more legible.

[0] http://imgur.com/2wVXvUr

weiyin15• 12 years ago

Hi Michael.

Thanks for taking a look! And sorry our site is having some problems on Firefox. Maybe use Chrome for now until we fix it up.

This service we put together would allow anybody to run iOS simulators in the browser for a whole variety of reasons. For example, a developer can easily send builds to clients/colleagues or even embed the demo in a website or blog post.

Cheers, Weiyin

phoboslab2• 12 years ago

This is really cool!

The "video" quality is pretty bad though. From what I can see, the app streams base64 encoded JPEGs via WebSockets and draws them in a Canvas. The overhead of sending complete images costs a lot of bandwidth.

You may want to look into jsmpeg for live streaming: https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg

weiyin15• 12 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion, that looks like a cool library. A future goal is to be able to provide higher resolution images to fully show off the high DPI displays.

kolencherry• 12 years ago

Why not use WebRTC for streaming the video?

TD-Linux• 12 years ago

You don't even need to go that complicated. A WebM stream over HTTP is pretty easy and would work well for this.

TheMakeA2• 12 years ago

We've actually experimented with jsmpeg for this type of thing. The problem we ran into was that jsmpeg seemed to require every frame from ffmpeg. If the browser or network slowed, the feed would fall behind the simulation, leading to several seconds of latency when interacting.

We'd love to use it and appreciate your hard work though. Do you have any ideas on how that problem can be solved?

phoboslab2• 12 years ago

There are two sides to this problem. For jsmpeg (or even in the server), it would be possible to simply wait for the next intra frame (a frame that doesn't require previous frames to decode) on certain conditions and throw away all other frames in between. This will give the decoder and network time to catch up. By default ffmpeg emits one intra frame per second, iirc.

The more difficult part is probably detecting this lag. I'm not sure how this could be done. Maybe the node websocket server (ws) can detect congestion somehow.

userbinator3• 12 years ago

base64 encoded JPEGs

MJPEG is supported in all browsers I know of, and would cut down on bandwidth by 33% over base64.

(If you really want to use WebSockets, a more dense encoding than base64 could also help - look into base85, for example.)

niutech3• 12 years ago

MJPEG is good, but keep in mind that Chrome doesn't support playback of MJPEG streams as a main resource, it has to be in an <img> tag.

tuscany• 12 years ago

Running an iOS simulator in the browser is different from using a browser to connect to an iOS simulator on a server. That said, this is still cool!

My only question is how you're going to combat abuse. You're basically providing free servers in the demo. The economics of doing that means no amount of captcha will save you (it's been tried many times).

Even if you don't provide a demo and charge for simulating, you're buying into a whole new problem of metering while maintaining a sane price. Comments?

That said, congratulations on shipping working software!

weiyin15• 12 years ago

hi tuscany,

all solid points, and thanks for your support.

we will definitely need to think through abuse, server costs, etc. it's a pretty lean setup but still gotta run on mac hardware :)

weiyin

miguelrochefort• 12 years ago

Make it work with Xamarin (Windows).

phmagic• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what problem this solves but it's technically cool.

fuzzywalrus• 12 years ago

That was my initial reaction as an iOS developer would have access to Simulators via Xcode.

That said, I could see this as a tool for sharing to a client for demo purposes.

gurkendoktor• 12 years ago

You can let users play around with your paid app to see if it works as expected. Certainly cleaner than messing with In-App-Purchases or a separate "Lite" version of your app.

I've heard in one episode of the Core Intuition podcast that Panic has actually spent some time polishing a simulator build of Transmit(?) for iOS, for use with app.io (a service which did the same thing as the OP until they pivoted). This is something I'd also love to do if this business promises to survive longer than app.io did.

This is especially interesting if you are an iOS freelancer who wants to show off their work, without clients having to create accounts etc. :)

chrisnolet5• 12 years ago

It was a demo of Panic's DietCoda! It was running for a while but I think it's been taken down now (since App.io's pivot maybe).

JosephRedfern• 12 years ago

Yo, dawg... http://i.imgur.com/Ib0WUeT.png

weiyin15• 12 years ago

uh... oh boy. you're really pushing the boundaries of our testing... :)

LandoCalrissian• 12 years ago

Haha, I'm a little surprised since this was the first thing I did. Actually works pretty well.

woogiee• 12 years ago

not sure if you care about this one...http://i.imgur.com/OsGo10T.png

tricolon• 12 years ago

I got a little further... http://i.imgur.com/IVktzqU.png

pit• 12 years ago

Wow, I thought I was super clever for doing that, and everybody else thought of it first!

http://cl.ly/image/2L3y0c3G2q0j

danbruc• 12 years ago

Developers are all the same, how could I expect to be the only one thinking of this? Anyway, I made it down to the 4th level in appetize.io-ception before the sessions started timing out.

http://i.imgur.com/wCIXQUB.png

userbinator3• 12 years ago

You should do this on the browser of an iPhone. :-)

erjiang• 12 years ago

I'd be willing to pay money for this, seriously. I've followed you on Twitter - let me know if anything happens.

We were using and enjoying app.io[0] until they decided to pivot and stop serving us.

[0] they didn't support pinch gestures, which made using a map impossible

marxdeveloper• 12 years ago

Needs landscape! Overall very awesome service.

weiyin15• 12 years ago

Agreed! We are also working on supporting additional device types (iPad, iPad mini, iPhone 6(+)).

DenisM• 12 years ago

There's market here for training corporate users over the internet to use line of business iPad apps.

I'd pay for it, if it actually made training easier...

ceeK• 12 years ago

Could this be used without the frame to emulate iOS apps on the web?

I.e, with AutoLayout, can you not adjust the frame of the app to be that of Android, and therefore have a semi-legit looking webapp for Android without developing a responsive website?

dcx• 12 years ago

Nice work! I might pay for a version of this to get our graphic designer off using Xcode (my app uses an art/config format which can be pulled from a web server). Especially if it could help them quickly test results on multiple device formats and iOS versions. It'd be handy to have a slower full-resolution option too!

weiyin15• 12 years ago

Definitely on our to-do list. Stay tuned!

719Ben• 12 years ago

You may want to watch out for people using this a proxy to do bad stuff with your servers. I noticed that all traffic is coming from Georgia, not my computer.

maxsavin• 12 years ago

Nice. I would consider turning off motion in the settings because it would look less quirky in the videos

kaivi• 12 years ago

Well, this is cool, but Safari allows for loading basically any file located on the filesystem. For instance, trying file:///etc/passwd results in file found but can not be opened by Safari.

That could be an attack vector.

shortstuffsushi2• 12 years ago

Could you explain where you think the issue here is? Are you saying, as a user trying to upload, you could possibly (presumably accidentally) upload your passwd, or as a user of their site, you could somehow see their passwd file?

If it's the former, I think that's a 'vulnerability' with any site that has a file chooser.

If it's the latter, could you elaborate where and how you would do so? Perhaps you're saying you could load it through the simulator that's running on the actual computer/vm somewhere, but those simulator environment are sandboxes (afaik) so that you could only access files on within the simulator's context.

chrisnolet5• 12 years ago

Simulator instances aren't sandboxed, so you can transverse the master system's file system with a malicious iOS app. This is indeed an attack vector.

weiyin15• 12 years ago

Agreed. This is an issue not just for Safari, but someone can upload a specially crafted app that browses the file system.

In this iteration we are using the OS permission system to isolate users. We are looking into more effective sandbox methods. Security is an ongoing process, and we always take an adversarial point of view when evaluating our system.

vblord• 12 years ago

Just having the simulator isn't enough for us Xamarin developers. One big issue with Xamarin is that you need a mac (with xcode installed) on the network in order to do builds. If you could solve that issue along with the having the simulator online then you have my money.

viktorbenei• 12 years ago

Not ideal but you can use an iOS CI/CD / build automation service like Bitrise (http://www.bitrise.io/) (co-founder / CTO here) to do the builds for you. If the simulator service has an API you can even automate the connection with Bitrise.

There are a few online code compilers too like this Swift one (http://swiftstub.com/) to work with.

Certainly not ideal but probably not impossible.

P.S. at this time you're probably better with an OS X VPS.

mentos• 12 years ago

Very cool, what lead you to develop this?

niutech3• 12 years ago

It reminds me of Pieceable: http://www.pieceable.com/

damianknz• 12 years ago

hang on. im stuck here.

http://imgur.com/F1gLIzb

Show HN: Run dedicated iOS Simulators in the browser

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