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!

Yes, absolutely. It's on our roadmap.

Woah, this is pretty cool

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.

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.