Virtual Says It Can Emulate iOS Or Android Devices In The Cloud

 

A new company called Virtual is claiming that it can imitate nearly any Android or iOS device almost perfectly in software, on any platform, with nearly ‘native quality’ performance. It does this with a combination of virtualization and emulation technology and it could change the way that developers test apps.
Chris Wade started out hacking the iPhone in its earliest days, and contributed to some of the first jailbreak exploits. Since then, he’s dabbled in a variety of hardware and software hacking projects. Back in 2011, he launched his newest endeavor: an attempt to create an open-source iOS device emulator called iEmu.
Though Wade got the funding he needed via Kickstarter, he cancelled the project, fearing that getting public funding would make him a target for litigation. Emulation, after all, requires impersonating proprietary hardware, and though there are some precedents in place for duplicating out-of-date devices, the iPhone is very much still around.
That’s where Virtual comes in. It’s the spiritual successor to iEmu, but instead of just iOS, it also handles emulating Android devices.

“The idea was to move away from emulation and go to full-blown virtualization,” Wade says. Virtual allows a user to purchase a license to run a certain amount of iOS or Android devices with as close to real hardware capabilities as possible. Wade claims that Virtual has managed to virtualize the ARM core and emulate peripherals that allow it to double as almost any Apple TV, iPad or iPhone.
Virtual is currently working with HP to evaluate their Moonshot ARM servers, which will be available later in 2014. The servers allow Virtual’s proprietary hypervisor to manage virtual machines for both iOS and Android, markets that are dominated by ARM.
Wade says they’ve been seeing “really phenomenal” performance from the new HP servers.
The advantage to virtualization and emulation over simulation is manyfold. There are the performance gains, of course. Wade says that virtualization and emulation offer a significantly more accurate representation of the physical device at a low level, which means they offer a more accurate development and testing experience.

Apple famously states over and over in its programming and testing guidelines that developers should test on a real physical device, in order to get a feel for how their code will act in the real world. But even Apple provides a simulator (not an emulator) that allows developers to get some real-time feedback on how their apps are running.

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