Since Apple began its transition to custom-designed M-series chips in late 2020, the entire Mac ecosystem has undergone a profound transformation. This shift from Intel x86 processors to Apple Silicon (based on the ARM architecture) has brought significant improvements in performance, power efficiency, and the overall developer experience. As all new Macs now exclusively feature these chips, this marks a critical point for developers and QA teams. To ensure your applications are ready for the future of Apple's technology, you must adapt your testing strategy to this new hardware.
The Impact on Developers and Testers
For developers, the M-series chips offer a leap in performance, particularly for tasks like code compilation and rendering. The unified memory architecture allows the CPU and GPU to share data with extremely low latency, resulting in faster, more responsive applications.
However, this architectural shift also means that traditional testing environments built on Intel hardware may no longer be sufficient. To deliver a high-quality user experience, it's no longer enough to just test your application on an Intel Mac running Rosetta 2 translation — you need to validate its performance and functionality on native Apple Silicon hardware.
This is especially critical given Apple's rapid user adoption rates for new software. For example, iOS 18 has a strong adoption rate, with around 88% of all active Apple mobile devices running it, and 76% of iPhones from the last four years updated. This rapid adoption, driven by new features and Apple's push for developers to use the new SDK, puts pressure on developers to update their apps. These updates often include major changes and new capabilities that must be thoroughly tested to ensure a seamless experience for your customers. Relying on an outdated testing environment means you risk missing critical performance regressions and compatibility issues that could impact your users.
The Need for Virtual Device Testing
Emulation and simulators can provide a level of testing at scale that truly helps drive improved efficiency in your testing workflows. By leveraging concurrency and parallelism, you’re able to run more tests simultaneously, resulting in an expedited testing workflow with broader coverage.
Testing on Apple Silicon iOS simulators means they can now run the app’s code natively without any translations, which provides:
Closer UX Reality: This native execution provides a much more accurate and faithful representation of the end-user experience. It's not a perfect substitute for a real device, but it is a massive improvement over the Intel-based simulator.
Accurate Performance: Performance testing on the simulator is now more reliable. The underlying architecture is the same, so you can get a better sense of how your app will perform on an actual device.
Reduced Discrepancies: This native execution reduces the risk of encountering "simulator-only" bugs or behaviors that never appear on a real device, and vice versa. It helps developers catch issues earlier in the development cycle.
Developers are shifting more of their testing to virtual devices, which are faster and easier to manage. This means they spend less time toiling with a large fleet of physical devices.
Our Commitment to Mobile Continuous Quality
At Sauce Labs, we understand this critical need and are dedicated to providing the best-in-class infrastructure for our customers' mobile app testing requirements. We've invested in new hardware and an orchestration tech stack built specifically for Apple Silicon, allowing you to future-proof your testing on the latest Mac OS and iOS versions with improved performance and reliability.
This new infrastructure is available in our US and EU data centers, ensuring that you can test on native Apple hardware at the scale you expect from Sauce Labs. By providing a true, uncompromised testing environment, we are positioned to support the future of Apple's technologies for years to come. Our goal is to empower your team to meet your quality goals by delivering accurate, reliable, and high-performance test results on the devices your customers use every day.
This means being proactive towards maintaining iOS compliance, with the focus being on proactive maintenance and strict adherence to Apple's standards. Your development team must consistently update apps to the latest iOS SDK before Apple's deadlines and follow the App Store Review Guidelines closely. Critical elements include ensuring privacy transparency by correctly utilizing privacy labels, handling user permissions, and adhering to the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework. Furthermore, apps must maintain robust security best practices that are actively maintained to ensure full functionality with the latest versions of iOS.
Sauce Labs Premium Virtual Device Cloud provides support for automated mobile app and web tests for both iPhone and iPad models running iOS 18 and beyond. You can expect:
Up to 40% faster test execution time leads to quicker feedback, allowing you to fix bugs earlier and release with greater confidence.
Testing graphics-rich apps will be more efficient with PVCS browsers and simulators, saving developer time with 2.5x faster rendering speed.
Scalability, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness that can’t be achieved by managing real devices.
Mobile and web apps that work on a broad set of browsers and OS combinations for comprehensive cross-platform coverage.
Our Premium Virtual Device Cloud gives you instant access to the latest version of iOS. Start testing today to ensure continuous mobile quality!
Contact your Account Executive to learn more about testing on the latest iOS and Android emulators for Sauce automated testing, or read through the detailed documentation.
