baguette

Baguette is a Swift CLI that boots iOS Simulator devices, streams their screens at up to 60fps, and injects taps, swipes and multi-finger gestures without ever opening Simulator.app. Run it on your Mac and you get a headless simulator farm and an automation harness in one tool. Apache 2.0, installed with brew install baguette, and it needs an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 26.

The hard parts (host-level input, the accessibility tree, MJPEG or H.264 streaming) go through Apple's SimulatorKit and a private accessibility framework. Input needs no code injected into your app. The newer camera simulation does inject a library into simulator-launched apps, so know that before you turn it on. A web UI on localhost:8421 shows every booted simulator side by side, and the CLI exposes everything for CI.

Solo iOS developers: free, fast, and easier to script than Simulator.app. Teams with Mac CI runners: it covers screenshot generation and regression sweeps across many simulator configs. It does not replace real devices; physical iPhone support is a view-only preview.

The catch is private frameworks. Xcode 27 already broke it once: taps returned success while the device saw nothing. Baguette shipped a heal command for it, but expect that cycle every major release.