To truly evaluate the user experience, there is no substitute for having the app on your iPhone and in your hands. Yet, it’s rare that a person can make an iPhone app that doesn’t depend on a server of some kind.
If you don’t have a server deployed somewhere yet, what can one do? Well, you can hardcode values in the app. However, that can be more trouble than it’s worth. Also, you’re not testing the whole app end to end. So, what one can do is create a mock server that returns hardcoded values using Node.js or some other framework. Great!
Just one thing, the mock server your iPhone depends on is not ready to be deployed. It’s on your machine only. What to do?
You can run the server locally on your mac and have your iPhone hit it over wireless. Sounds easy enough. Right?
After figuring out your IP address of your machine for the phone to hit, changing the iPhone app to hit whatever URL it needs, and probably temporarily turning off App Transport Security so you can hit it with an http as opposed to an https URL, you may find that your iPhone app still cannot hit the machine your mock server is running on.
Stack Overflow to the rescue! After digging into the google world, I found the key sentence I was looking for in a Stack Overflow post:
I turned off my WI-FI on my Mac and then turned it on again, which solved the problem.
Although I’m not positive, it seems like I had to flip the wireless from on to off and back to on more than once. To test that the phone can reach the machine, I used safari on the iPhone to check that I can hit anything at all on that machine.
Once I figured all this out, I was so happy that I decided to write this for others to use. If it wasn’t for Stack Overflow and our community of knowledge sharers, where would we be today?
