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Momentic supports iOS testing on:
  • Remote simulators hosted by Momentic. Upload your .app, pick a channel and tag, and each test gets a fresh simulator.
  • Local simulators managed by your Xcode install (macOS only).
Real devices are not supported. Pick the simulator per test via the Region dropdown: any Momentic region selects remote simulators; Local selects local simulators.

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Remote simulators

Momentic provisions fresh simulators on demand in under a second.

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App management

Remote simulators install your app from a channel and tag you pick in the test settings. Upload builds from the dashboard’s Assets page or with momentic-mobile assets. See hosted test environments for how channels, tags, and aliases work. Momentic requires a testing build as a .app bundle. In Xcode, use Product, then Build For, then Testing. See App setup for the full walkthrough.

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Regions

Set the Region in each test’s settings. If unset, Momentic picks the closest region to the caller’s IP. Use a continent region. It gives Momentic the flexibility to schedule across every data center in the continent, which improves allocation reliability. A specific data-center region can hit capacity limits that a continent selection avoids.
  • US (us)
  • Europe (eu)
iOS is not available in Asia (as). You can also pin to a specific data-center region if you need deterministic latency to a particular location:
  • US East (us-east1)
  • US East 2 (us-east2)
  • US West (us-west1)
  • US West 2 (us-west2)
  • EU North (eu-north1)
The region is a scheduling preference. When it has no capacity, Momentic can provision the simulator in another region. For data residency, see regions.

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iOS versions

iOS 26 is supported. If you need a different iOS version, reach out to the Momentic team.

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Local simulators

Local simulators require macOS and Xcode. See App setup for install prerequisites including idb. Local simulators are supported, but slower to start than remote simulators. A cold local simulator can take tens of seconds to boot; remote simulators provision in under a second. If a test fails before the app appears, the simulator was likely still booting. Prefer remote simulators (any non-Local region) for a faster loop, or boot the simulator once up front so later runs reuse the warm instance:

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Configuration

Install your app on a local simulator via one of:
  1. Test-level app path: set an .app path in each test’s settings.
  2. Environment-based settings: see below.
  3. CLI flag overrides, --local-app-path and --local-ios-device-type on run take precedence over the test-level app path and environment-based settings.

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Environment-based iOS settings

Engineers with different file layouts can use environment variables:
momentic.config.yaml
Each developer then sets MOMENTIC_IOS_DEVICE_TYPE and MOMENTIC_IOS_APP_PATH in their .env file or ~/.zshrc. Environment-based config is active only when the test runs in that environment, and can’t be overridden at the test level.

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Start timeout

Momentic waits up to 300 seconds for a local simulator to finish starting. A fresh simulator boots in about 20 seconds on an Apple silicon laptop, but can take several minutes on hosted CI runners with fewer cores. If a run fails during setup with a simulator that never finished booting, raise the budget with the emulator.localEmulatorStartTimeout setting, in milliseconds:
momentic.config.yaml