iOS Developer Disks and Windows

Eggplant Functional
1

Hello,

I was excited to see the availability of Mobile Device Connection for Windows in 22.5.0. However, after reading through the documentation (Working with iOS Mobile Devices | EPF Docs) I see that there is still a reliance on the original iOS installation files, or Developer Disks.

I have two questions related to this:

  1. Are the Developer Disks tied to the specific Apple developer certificates of the current user (and profiles), or can they be shared across different Windows systems by testers who each have their own unique Apple dev certificate? Based upon how the certificates are enrolled currently for Eggplant mobile testing, my instinct says the answers are “no, they’re not” and “yes, they can” but I’ve not yet gotten my instance on Windows running yet. I’m hoping my instinct is right, however :wink:

  2. I’ve looked at various “hacks” folks have put together to run iOS virtual machines in the hope of being able to get mobile testing off the desktop and into Eggplant Manager as a VM SUT. We do need mobile testing to not be limited to a single tester, and while Windows is a great shift toward that goal, it all might depend on the answer to #1 above! Has there been any move toward compatibility with other platforms like Sauce Labs? Sauce Labs is an awesome platform but I don’t think we’ll be using their service any time soon and we have to come up with another path internally, or set mobile automated testing to the side as a “once in a while” effort. There are some open source systems that can serve as a “Sauce Labs” light and understanding better how the existing Sauce Labs support works, and whether additional support down the road will be made available for similar systems would help guide future internal efforts.

Thanks!

1 Like
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We are also very interested in the answer to this question.

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Hey Chris,

thanks for your great questions:

  1. Developer disks are part of the XCode installation and do not have any connection to a developer certificate or the provisioning profile. iOS Devices | Eggplant Gateway Docs (eggplantsoftware.com)

You can simply extract the developer disk from the Xcode path: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport
The Disk must match the Ios Version of your mobile phone
These can be shared via a (git) repository across teams and systems.

  1. Great news for you! We do have a native Saucelabs integration in EPF since 22.4 I believe.
    You do require a saucelabs account and you can use any of their Device (mobile/real/simulates/browser stack). Using the Eggplant Functional Connection List | Saucelabs(eggplantsoftware.com)

  2. BTW you can expose your mobile devices within your network with our gateways in order for multiple users to access and use them as SUTs. This seems to be your use case. Reach out to our support and they’ll provide the instructions. This is available for iOS and Android mobile devices.

  3. Which “Saucelabs” like providers do you have in mind?

Let us know in case you do have further questions.

Cheers,
Karsten

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Karsten,

Thanks for the clarification! Now that I know the iOS version of the device needs to match that of the Developer Disk (which I guess should have been obvious) I’ll take another stab at setting up my Windows iOS test environment.

Regarding iOS Gateway, while I did utilize that initially, there really was no efficient way to plan and execute real device testing across multiple testers via that model. Exposing the device to the network is great, of course, but it does require some resource scheduling and device monitoring.

Which is why I was hoping to look at something like Sauce Labs or LambdaTest. Neither one seem to be good options right now, so I’ll continue researching other tools that might get us into a GNU/Linux VM using iOS emulators. Due to the deeply proprietary nature of the Apple systems, we have to be careful to only use tools that are not treading on the Apple agreements.

For now the Developer Disks seem like a good way to quickly get other testers up-and-running without the need for Mac OS and Xcode installations so I’ll put all my effort there and take your recommendation for tossing it up to Git once we have validated the support file.

Appreciate it!