Both the iOS and Android platforms provide mechanisms to rapidly test your application in a simulated device environment. As discussed in Chapter 1, Installing and Setting Up Xamarin Studio, iOS provides simulators while the Android SDK provides emulators for this purpose, and the two systems are fundamentally different. For more information on those differences, please refer to the Setting up simulators and emulators section in Chapter 1, Installing and Setting Up Xamarin Studio. For the sake of simplicity, we'll use the term "simulator" to refer to both iOS- and Android-simulated device testing for the remainder of this discussion.

In addition to helping you locate issues and defects in your app during the early phases of development, testing in a simulator provides a number of distinct advantages over physical device testing in several areas. For one, the simulated environment provides testing tools that are not available on the device. For another, simulators can provide basic...