[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Wolfia (YC S22) - A mobile app emulator y...
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Launch HN: Wolfia (YC S22) - A mobile app emulator you can share
with a link
Hi HN! We're Fabien and Naren, co-founders of Wolfia
(https://www.wolfia.com). Wolfia lets you share a link to a mobile
emulator running your app. Developers can get feedback instantly on
a feature they just built by sharing a link to an interactive
version of their app. We're starting with Android but iOS is coming
soon! Mobile app development in 2022 is harder than it should be -
you can't easily change a line of code, rebuild the app, and have
someone on the other side of the world see the result in seconds.
Instead of the rapid iterations that web app developers enjoy,
mobile app developers are stuck with pushing builds every night and
waiting a day for the team to see the new code. That's if they even
have a nightly build setup. Most people also only have one phone,
so they can never test the Android app if they have an iPhone and
vice versa. We've been developing mobile apps for over 10 years
(at Facebook, Wealthfront, etc.). In that time, the tooling has
dramatically improved, yet we still found ourselves having to go
and install emulators on a PM's laptop and give them commands to
copy and paste on the terminal because they didn't have an Android
phone. Or we would have to procure test phones and wait for a build
to be pushed. We're building Wolfia to finally make this process
seamless. Wolfia lets developers send a link to an APK (an Android
binary) that's running on an emulator accessible via the browser.
You can then play with the app without the need for a physical
device. This dramatically shortens the feedback loop and completely
transforms the dev cycle: from days to hours or even minutes.
Product managers and designers can use it to check that a new
feature is being built up to their specs. Developers can use it to
check if the code is running correctly. Founders, user researchers
and salespeople can use it for interactive demos of the product.
We host headless (without GUI) Android emulators with hardware
acceleration running on AWS bare metal instances to get high
performance. We use WebSockets to make a two-way connection between
the browser and the emulator through ADB (Android Debug Bridge).
The emulator's GUI is displayed on the browser via an H.264 video
feed, and we relay the user's touch events back to the emulator. We
use WSS to make this secure. Try it for free at
https://www.wolfia.com! (you can try a demo - we used
Materialistic, an open source HN app - or sign up for free and
upload your own app) We would love to hear your thoughts, ideas
and feedback!
Author : fabiendevos
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-08-08 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wolfia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wolfia.com)
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| 15 min/session, even on highest payed tier?
|
| I smell AWS Lambda :D
| btheshoe wrote:
| Woah, this is pretty cool
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| 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.
| narenkmano wrote:
| Thank you! You should be able to try it out now. If you can't
| still, pm me at naren@wolfia.com
| liminalsunset wrote:
| 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.
| narenkmano wrote:
| 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.
| deerparkwater wrote:
| 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
| TimCTRL wrote:
| 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.
| rock_artist wrote:
| Indeed. With Android my biggest problem is devices behave
| differently and even just changing Andriid APIs discover
| issues.
| narenkmano wrote:
| Yes, we plan to support different devices and API levels soon.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| 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/
| fabiendevos wrote:
| 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. :)
| rareitem wrote:
| Very interesting! Do you plan to support ios apps in the future?
| narenkmano wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. It's on our roadmap.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| 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.
| fabiendevos wrote:
| 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?
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Is iOS via the iPhone Simulator?
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| 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...
| Gustavoelbers wrote:
| tauntz wrote:
| 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)
| narenkmano wrote:
| Looked at the website. Looks pretty cool. Will check it out!
| aneesv wrote:
| This is a great service! Do you plan to provide an API to upload
| new apps?
| narenkmano wrote:
| 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.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| 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.
| narenkmano wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| how is it different from appetize.io?
| fabiendevos wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| 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?
| fabiendevos wrote:
| 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.
| 6figurelenins wrote:
| > 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.
| fabiendevos wrote:
| 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?
| 6figurelenins wrote:
| 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.
| narenkmano wrote:
| 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 :)
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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
| tpmx wrote:
| 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.
| narenkmano wrote:
| 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.
| smashah wrote:
| Nice! Do you plan to support virtual camera (e.g I give it a
| stream to use for the camera)
| dfgwt wrote:
| 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?
| fabiendevos wrote:
| 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.
| dfgwt wrote:
| 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.
| fabiendevos wrote:
| Ah yeah that's probably why, our servers are only on the
| west coast for now, we'll add more locations in the future.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 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!
| dfgwt wrote:
| Agreed, I'm impressed by just clicking a link and seeing the
| app there to use, no messing around. Good stuff.
| liminalsunset wrote:
| 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
| narenkmano wrote:
| 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 :)
| fudged71 wrote:
| This would be fantastic for executive assistants
| fabiendevos wrote:
| Interesting, what use case do you have in mind for EAs?
| forrest2 wrote:
| 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
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