Share & Install the iOS App on Simulator

As an iOS developer, we know both Xcode and iPhone are fundamental building blocks to run and test our application. What if we want to share our application to someone who doesn’t have a real device. Maybe you want to install the build in the simulator without building again & run it using Xcode.

Let’s discuss how to achieve this here:

Let’s create a sample application and I have chosen here device iPhone XS Max and OS version is 13.3 for development.

Build the sample app. You can see the executable inside Product folder.

Refer to the above image where we got BuildReferences.app as an executable file and save it in Desktop.

From Xcode menu Open Developer Tool -> Simulator

From simulator select the device where you want to install the application

Open the Terminal application and execute the following command:

xcrun simctl list

The above command lists out all the available simulators. simctl command controls the instances of the simulators.

Make a note on the UDID of the simulator which you have selected previously while building the sample app.

We can see the word (Booted) to identify the selected device.

The last step will be to install the BuildReferences.app inside the simulator which we have selected in the previous step. To do that again in Terminal execute the following command.

xcrun simctl install 351036B2-85AA-4E97-96AD-03A2FA1FD56E ~/Desktop/BuildReferences.app

That’s it. You can now see the build started installing on the selected simulator.

Happy coding!!!