Underrated use cases (which I hopefully don't ruin by saying out loud):

-Share a browser session; someone can log in and let someone else do stuff without having to share their password.

-Burner phone to install garbage, or untrusted apps on that "you only need once" or that you just need to use to screenshot a coupon etc.

-Burner phone to access Facebook or TikTok with, with no private data risk

-US IP address to get around geoblocking

Those are some great use cases! We already support the sharing sessions with multiple users. You can tap on the copy link to share control button on the bottom right of the emulator page and send it to someone to share your session :)

This would be fantastic for executive assistants

Interesting, what use case do you have in mind for EAs?

I've used an emulator in the past for GPS spoofing too. Obviously useful for testing and what not but also for location based apps / games / etc.

Tangent: IIRC Pokemon GO (and probably other more professional usecases for GPS spoofing) mitigates spoofing via a variety of techniques

It should be fairly straightforward for us to provide that option.

> mobile app developers are stuck with pushing builds every night and waiting a day for the team to see the new code

That doesn't ring true. TestFlight / Play Store uploads are typically available within 15 minutes.

Still, it's nice you're solving deployment overhead. In particular, my team needs side-by-side installs of the live/prod build and dev/staging build.

It's double the headache to stand up a store listing and comply with policy changes, just for an internal distribution channel. Save me.

Totally true that TestFlight / Play Store uploads are available within 15 min, but in our experience, nobody wants to push to those platform that frequently, and force many upgrades of the app every day, so instead they do nightly builds at best. More importantly, it doesn't help if people don't have the right phone. We would love to help you with this use case, does an emulator in the browser works for you or do you need to install to phones?

For me, an emulator solves the 80% case: I'm soliciting quick feedback on specific changes. I'd happily use one as TestFlight for dev builds. I'm optimistic my users (my team) would find it more convenient, less interruptive. I'll ask them.

The other 20% is stuff that doesn't work in an emulator. Usually Apple, certificates.

It's enough of a minefield that QA means real devices, unfortunately. Used phones are vastly cheaper than "false alarm" bug reports.

> in our experience, nobody wants to push to those platform that frequently, and force many upgrades of the app every day, so instead they do nightly builds at best

If my team's big enough for daily builds, we have continuous deployment (Fastlane or similar). Strictly speaking, the pain is the build step (slow; can be flaky), not pushing the artifact.

I hope this is helpful. Feel free to dig deeper, I'll keep an eye on this thread.

Thanks for the feedback, and let us know if your team is interested.

For the deployment, wolfia allows you to share builds before they are merged and solicit feedback from your team earlier. If you think about it, the feedback loop is much faster in practice than waiting for deployment and then getting the feedback. However, I do agree that the build step is a pain! Our vision is to bring the same experience web developers have to mobile essentially, so we'll take a stab at it in the future :)

I think many commenters here haven’t been a mobile engineer at a large company- most engineers don’t have creds to manage the app for the face of a +50B company.

Seems very well executed. Congrats!

When I last had a need for something like this confidentiality was a major concern (it was at a small-ish but publicly traded company). Not quite at the level of needing signed contracts, but at the same time something more than a random web service someone unnamed threw together would be required.

I notice that you haven't put your names and backgrounds on the site - that would help in building credibility. Demonstrating the YC backing would also help.

You can check out our security practices here - https://www.wolfia.com/security

Agreed with building credibility. We'll add our names and backgrounds along with the YC backing on our website soon.

Also, we plan to support an on-premises option in the future.

Names and pictures don't help in building credibility, because you can put any name you want and any picture you want online. What is that supposed to prove?

When you have a name, some background and perhaps a photo you can do some superficial background research using open resources. I do it all the time. Is it foolproof? no. Is it better than nothing? yes.

fyi - some feedback on your website, in case it might be helpful.

I clicked on it first before I read your description here.

Looking at your website, I had no idea what you were doing.

I don't even see "mobile" mentioned anywhere.

The headline says "Turn your app into a link"; I skipped over "APK", and read "get a shareable link to an interactive version of your app"

Um, isn't my app already interactive?

I scrolled through the rest of the page, and still had no idea what you did.

Then I came back here, clicked on "comments", and read your description.

Which was great. Oh, you give a link to a -> mobile app -> emulator -> which can be easily tested without having to get it on an actual phone.

If you took your description here and put it on your home page, it'd be much better :-)

This is good feedback, we will definitely update the description. Is "A mobile app emulator you can share with a link" clearer as a first sentence?

What a brilliant idea. Well done! Must have taken some real tech muscle too.

FYI: the first thing I did was click your demo app and try to read this article. I couldn't. Maybe this is because of your launch traffic spike but you should know.

Thank you! You should be able to try it out now. If you can't still, pm me at naren@wolfia.com

Are there any plans to share this link on all platforms at the same time? You can name this functionality Woof. I for one would consider paying 12.99/month for this functionality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wfG8ngFvPk

This is really excellent. A quick one, is there a plan for us to select a particular android device? This would be particularly useful for debugging apps.

Unlike in the IOS world, the Android market is so saturated with devices, you may not know how your app (camera feature for example) will behave on a Tecno phone.

Indeed. With Android my biggest problem is devices behave differently and even just changing Andriid APIs discover issues.

Yes, we plan to support different devices and API levels soon.

Congrats on your launch.

What are your distinguishing selling points (besides cost) compared to Amazon Device Farm[0]?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/device-farm/

Amazon Device Farm is mostly focused on testing on many different devices. We are more focused on collaboration between team members. We want to make it frictionless to share a build with your team, and get feedback from them with comments, redlines, and short clips. We're building towards this vision as fast as we can. :)

It appears that the keyboard on a computer does not work in the emulator on either Chrome or Firefox on Mac M1.

I think it would be useful to be able to use the keyboard to input text.

It isn't enabled by default. But, if you click on the keyboard icon on the control bar to the left of the emulator, you should be able to use your keyboard. This is something we plan to improve.

Love this idea. I’ve been sending screencasts to PMs for years now, something like this would have saved me dozens of hours over the years.

Since I’m mostly an Apple dev, when do you see yourselves supporting iOS as well? I’ve seen other companies try the “Mac/iOS in the cloud” thing and I’ve yet to see it work perfectly so I’m curious what your vision is to make it a great experience.

Thanks! We are hoping to support iOS within a couple of months. We want to have the same level of performance as what we achieve today with Android. I am curious what didn't work great when you tried iOS in the cloud options in the past? Just performance or something else as well?

Congratulations on your launch! Interesting product.

What happens if a user needs to share the emulated app with a colleague or prospective customer who requires accessibility tools such as TalkBack or VoiceOver? Can you run tools like that in the emulator alongside the app? I'm guessing this would be straightforward for Android, but maybe not so much for iOS.

Great question. We don't support audio (including TalkBack) at the moment. But it's very high on our roadmap.

For iOS, we plan to support similar features and we will explore if we can use the Accessibility Inspector tool to support VoiceOver.

15 min/session, even on highest payed tier?

I smell AWS Lambda :D

We're not running on AWS Lambda but we had the limit in place because our servers are pretty expensive to run. We are planning to add to the pricing model a pay as you go option which will allow for us to provide unlimited time per session.

Your customers don't care _why_ your service is unreasonably expensive.

Would you go to a dry cleaner that charged you $50 a shirt because "I fly the shirts to my brothers shop on the other coast to be cleaned"? Of course not.

I can think of no reason why you need to be on AWS vs a dedicated server or a stack of used Dell servers in your garage.

We did consider the option of building our own servers but getting started with AWS is much easier because we don't have to maintain our own hardware, so we went with that. This allows us to move much faster and deliver features that users want instead of optimizing costs.

Piggybacking on this, in case you're looking for general purpose blazingly fast Android emulators to run your tests on, then hop over to https://emulator.wtf

(I'm not using the term lightly here - we're multiple times faster and more stable than Firebase Test Lab and you could be running your full test suite in a couple of minutes, instead of hours)

Nice. I think you should do your own Show HN post. Your website needs your name and company info.

Looked at the website. Looks pretty cool. Will check it out!

Wow, this could have been useful back in 2012 when I was building an Android app and hard-coded a web demo in JS. I still feel proud of it, but probably would have preferred this route :-D

Looks cool, but using it from another mobile device is very slow. Or maybe it's latency to the servers hosting the emulators, I'm not sure. Is there a way to see the ping time?

Yes it works on mobile but is a bit slower, we want to continue to improve performance there. It's reasonable on a Pixel 6 pro, I'm curious which phone are you using? We'll look into the ping time.

It's a Samsung Galaxy A52s, I tried Firefox and Chrome.

Also used a TCP ping app to check what seems to be the demo server - node1.wolfia.com? Average was around 160ms, ranging from 70 to 300ish, so I guess that was the real issue!

I'm located in UK and using a 4G network. Might try it again tomorrow from work and see how it compares.

Ah yeah that's probably why, our servers are only on the west coast for now, we'll add more locations in the future.

FWIW the demo runs really well in my pixel 4a, although some of the text on the page covers up the navbar. Love how low friction it is though!

Agreed, I'm impressed by just clicking a link and seeing the app there to use, no messing around. Good stuff.

Awesome stuff. I tried the demo ... from within the demo. :)

From the privacy page:

> After each emulator use, we uninstall the app and remove the app data through .

It seems like there's something missing in that sentence.

Good catch. Fixed!

Amazing! Props to the creators, incredible idea.

Allowing for complementary sign up options besides google would most likely encourage more people that use no google services evaluating the platform, myself included.

Something to keep in mind in case you notice more people bouncing off your register page more than you'd normally expect.

Good point. We have other options for sign up pretty high on our list. We wanted to launch the MVP as soon as possible to hear feedback so that we can talk to customers and iterate on the right thing. We'll prioritize this higher :)

Nice! Do you plan to support virtual camera (e.g I give it a stream to use for the camera)

We can look into it. Adding it to the backlog.

Do you happen to be hiring for customer support / engineering support roles?

We are not hiring at the moment. However, feel free to connect with me at naren@wolfia.com. I might be able to help with a referral, if you are interested.

This is a great service! Do you plan to provide an API to upload new apps?

Thank you! That's the next item on our roadmap. We plan to create a public API and gradle plugin to automate link creation.

Our vision is to have a stable link for your app that links to the latest version of the app so that people can quickly find and interact with it.

Is this using the android emulator under the hood or something custom?

Yes, we are using the android emulator. More info on how we do it here - https://www.wolfia.com/security. Eventually, i'll write up a detailed blog.

Very interesting! Do you plan to support ios apps in the future?

Yes, absolutely. It's on our roadmap.

Drag and drop uploading doesn't work on the homepage

how is it different from appetize.io?

Good question, it's similar indeed but in our experience Appetize is significantly slower. We are also going to focus on collaboration between team members as opposed to testing and training.

you mean the free tier? with bigger tiers you can reserve the device

also I don't understand the 15 minute session timeout

what happens when the time runs out?

Yes our free tier should be more performant than theirs. In the future, we want to differentiate on collaboration features. For the session limit: we haven't added it to the pricing page yet but we have an option to pay as you go which removes the 15 minute timeout.

Is iOS via the iPhone Simulator?

We do not support iOS yet but yes, the plan is to use the simulator.

Woah, this is pretty cool

Heh, I was in an incubator in 2012, ten years ago! Where they managed to do this with IOS apps:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121203101645/https://www.kickf...

Oh nice! Looks like it was mostly used as a marketing tool which is a use case we're considering. Do you happen to know more about them?

I came here to see if anyone mentioned Kickfolio :) They ended up changing their name to App.io at one point. Smart, great group of folks. Closed down back in like 2015.