How To Simulate A Bad Network Connection On Your iOS Device and Simulator

While developing an app that requires an internet connection, it is very important to handle use-cases when the connection is slow or non-existent. To figure out when there’s a bad connection via your code, you can use this great Reachability library.

Once Reachability is implement it, it’s pretty easy to test it by simulating a bad connection on your iPhone or iPhone Simulator if you know what tools to use. Here is how you can test a your app on different internet connections using your iPhone and iPhone Simulator:

How To Simulate a Bad Internet Connection On Your iPhone

It’s really easy to simulate a bad internet connection on your iPhone, since all the necessary tools are already built in. Just go to your Settings app, select the Developer setting:

Select the Network Link Conditioner Status option:

This will take you to a screen to bad network options:

Now just select the bad network you want, and start testing how your app works (or doesn’t) in the worst conditions!

How To Simulate a Bad Internet Connection in You iPhone Simulator

In XCode, go to the Xcode Menu, select Open Developer Tool menu, then select the More Developer Tools… option:

This will take you to your apple developer account, so you’ll have to sign in. Once, signed in, download the Hardware IO Tools for Xcode:

Once you’ve downloaded the file and gone through the install process, open your System Preferences and drag the Network Link Conditioner.prefPane file into it:

Now just open the Network Link Conditioner from your System Preferences at any time to mess with your internet connection 🙂

Note that this will impact your computer internet connection in addition to your iPhone simulator.