tapflow
Run mobile QA in the browser — self-hosted, your whole team
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Duchan

tapflow - Run mobile QA in the browser — self-hosted, your whole team

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A self-hosted platform for running iOS simulators and Android emulators directly in the browser. Uses the Mac your team already owns — no cloud uploads, no monthly fees. MIT open source.

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Duchan
Maker
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Why pay for cloud simulators when your team already has Macs?

Anyone on our team who needed to check something on mobile — a server developer verifying a sandbox build, a designer checking layouts across screen sizes, a product manager comparing versions — had to stop a mobile developer and ask.

Simulators only ran on developer machines, behind complex toolchain setups. We couldn't ask every team member to go through that just to run a simulator.

I looked at Appetize and BrowserStack. Both solved the problem, but before signing up I hit two issues:

  • The pricing scales fast with team size ($59+/month and up)

  • App binaries get uploaded to their cloud — a non-starter for anything sensitive

We already had Macs in the office. Why pay monthly for cloud simulators we could run ourselves?

So I built tapflow instead.

tapflow lets anyone on your team run iOS simulators and Android emulators directly in the browser using Macs they already own.

No cloud uploads.
No monthly device farm fees.
No app binaries leaving your network.

Getting started is simple:

npm install -g tapflow
tapflow start

After that, anyone on your team can open a browser and start testing immediately.

Tap, swipe, install builds, rotate devices, take screenshots — all from the browser.

What's included:

  • Browser-based simulator & emulator control

  • iOS + Android support

  • Team management with invites and roles

  • Build uploads from the dashboard

  • Fully self-hosted

  • MIT licensed

One technical detail I'm especially proud of:
iOS simulator touch works without WebDriverAgent using SimDeviceLegacyHIDClient + IndigoHID.

We've been using it internally for a while, and I finally cleaned it up enough to open source it.

It's still early (v0.2.1), so there are definitely rough edges, but the core workflow is already usable.

Would genuinely love feedback from mobile teams, QA engineers, or anyone building internal developer tools.

And if it looks useful, a ⭐ on GitHub would really help the project get discovered.


🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/jo-duchan/tap...
📖 Docs: https://tapflow.dev

Thami Benjelloun

This is a solid move for teams that want full control over mobile testing without relying on expensive device farms. Keeping everything self hosted also makes compliance and security a lot easier to manage.

Duchan
Maker

@thamibenjelloun Thanks Thami! That's exactly the motivation behind it — teams already have Macs, so why pay for an external farm just to run a simulator? The compliance angle is something we hear a lot too, especially from teams that can't let app data leave the network. Appreciate you checking it out!