In OS X 10.10 (Yosemite Beta), How do I Test Using iOS 6.1 Simulator?

Question

I am trying to target iOS 6.1 using Xcode 5 in Yosemite Beta. However, the simulator won't even run the app, or show the default icons (all I get is a black iOS-shaped screen, and Home or Lock buttons are not working). The 7.1 simulator works fine.

I have also noticed that Xcode 6 Beta does not even offer simulator versions prior to 7.1.

Does this indicate that, even in the final of OS X 10.10, it will be impossible to simulate iOS versions prior to 7.x? This seems very unreasonable to me.

Is this expected behavior?

EDIT: So I had already tried re-installing and re-downloading the 6.1 simulator before posting this question, which did nothing to change the situation. I also checked other similar questions that dealt with the upgrade to Mavericks (OS X 10.9) but the versions supported seem oddly chosen.

I will submit the question to Apple and report back my findings, unless someone else replies who has more concrete information on this specific case.

Answer 1

As far as I have experienced, The iPhone simulator always have this kind of issue on every update of OS X, since the core of iPhone simulator is using the core of OS X, and it only support the latest two version. That is,

10.10 -> iOS 7, iOS 8.

10.9 -> iOS 6, iOS 7.

Meanwhile, Xcode obviously only support for downloading the latest two version simulator, which means you can get iOS 6 simulator in Xcode 5, but not in Xcode 6.

However you can get the old simulator by copy/paste the old SDKs into the correct folder, but this still follows the OSX-iOS relation. That is, if you have the iOS 6 simulator SDK, you can run the iOS 6 simulator on OSX 10.9, but not OSX 10.10.

Answer 2

iOS Simualtor runtimes older than iOS 7.0 will not work with Xcode 6. iOS Simulator runtimes older than iOS 7.1 will not work on OS X Yosemite.

Older versions of the iOS Simulator runtime cannot be made to work with Xcode 6 nor on OS X Yosemite without significant changes to those legacy runtimes.

You can still build your apps to support older iOS versions by setting an older deployment target, but you will not be able to test them on a simulated device running on OS X Yosemite. You can test on a physical device running iOS 6.1, or you can run Xcode 5.1.1 in OS X Mavericks to test your project in the older simulator.