The mobile testers sometimes don’t have access to real devices, it means they have to use simulator or emulator. Well, the Apple has simulator and Android offer an emulator.
The genymotion is commercial simulator for Android, I had use in the past and I think it is really good.
The most important question is: What is the difference between simulator and emulator:
Simulator: The simulator behaves in a similar way but doesn’t respect all the rules. For mobile testing it means simulate the behavior of the device but using the computer memory and cpu as you know is much greater than the real device.
Emulator: The emulator emulates both software and hardware, however not all the hardware can be emulated e.g. accelerometer, multi-touch and phone calls. For me one of big problems of emulator is consume a lot of resources on your computer, It means that sometimes your application will look slower in emulator than in real device.
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