EAS Simulator

EAS service - costs apply. EAS Simulator runs on Expo Application Services cloud infrastructure, a paid product with free-tier limits; remote simulator sessions use your plan's compute allowance. See https://expo.dev/pricing.

EAS Simulator runs a remote iOS simulator or Android emulator on EAS infrastructure that you drive from your machine — from the CLI, from an AI agent (via agent-device), and from a browser preview. It's the unlock for environments that can't run a simulator locally (Linux boxes, cloud/background agents like Cursor Cloud), and for letting an agent verify a change on a real device instead of only reasoning about code.

The simulator:* commands are experimental and hidden, and need a recent eas-cli (≥ 20.3.0 as of writing) — which is why this skill runs everything via npx --yes eas-cli@latest. Flags and verbs may change; if a command fails, <cmd> --help is authoritative.

When to use

The frontmatter description carries the trigger phrases. In short: use this to get a user's app onto a cloud simulator and interact with it — especially from a Mac-less or cloud/sandbox agent. Not for local sims (expo run:ios, Xcode, Android Studio), store builds/signing (that's EAS Build), or physical devices. For the macOS case, see Cloud vs local next.

Cloud vs local: decide this first

• Non-macOS (Linux / CI / cloud sandbox like Cursor Cloud, detect via uname -s ≠ Darwin): the only way to get a sim — just proceed.
• macOS: local sims exist and a cloud session costs money + latency, so ask first ("a remote cloud sim — to share a live preview, offload, or test an iOS version you lack — or just run locally?") unless the user explicitly said cloud/remote/shareable.
• Always honor an explicit choice; for "run it locally" hand off to expo run:ios / Xcode.