// the find
okwasniewski/MiniSim
MacOS menu bar app for launching iOS and Android 🤖 emulators
MiniSim is a native macOS menu bar app that lets you launch, manage, and interact with iOS simulators and Android emulators without opening Xcode or Android Studio. It's aimed at mobile developers who want faster access to emulators during day-to-day development work.
- 100% native Swift/AppKit with no Electron or web tech — menu opens instantly and the binary is small
- Custom commands support lets you extend it with your own ADB or xcrun scripts, which covers a lot of edge cases the built-in actions don't
- AppleScript API is a nice touch — enables automation and scripting workflows beyond just the GUI
- Solid test coverage for parsing and device service logic (DeviceParserTests, ADBTests, etc.), which matters a lot given how fragile xcrun/adb output parsing tends to be
- Entirely dependent on external tool output parsing (xcrun simctl, adb devices) — any format change in Xcode or Android SDK can silently break device discovery with no good error message to the user
- No support for physical device detection over USB, which is a common enough workflow that its absence is noticeable
- Preferences and custom commands are stored in UserDefaults with no import/export, so sharing config across machines or restoring after a reinstall is manual work
- macOS-only by design, so if your team has mixed macOS/Linux CI needs, none of this helps — the AppleScript surface is nice but doesn't bridge that gap