That said, if you just want to know what something looks like on the iPhone, Adobe AIR is a great choice. Hardware replication limits mean that you don’t get a comparison of apple to apple in terms of your app behaviour, and what you see in iPhone AIR may not be exactly what it renders or happens on an actual iOS device. Using the Adobe AIR runtime framework, you can create new instances of the iOS GUI right on your Windows PC. While not technically an emulator in the true sense of the term, this tool allows developers and testers to get a feel for what an app will look and behave like on iOS without actually running it on that operating system. The advent of emulators can be credited to tech geeks who wanted to save some old tech.įor example, you can play a Nintendo game console on your computer. This can be played because of an emulator. This is generally a hardware simulator in a piece of software. The emulator is software that can be used to copy other hardware (hardware).