When I debug a mobile app I end up with six tools open: Logcat, the Instruments window, Android Studio's profilers, a proxy like Charles, a terminal full of adb shell and xcrun simctl, and a text editor to read some database I pulled off the device. Every one of them knows a slice of what the emulator knows, and none of them talk to each other.
So I built EmuLabZip: one open-source app that connects to your running Android emulators and iOS simulators and brings all of that into one window. It is written in Rust, ships as a desktop app (Tauri + Svelte) and as a command line tool, and nothing gets installed on the device.
What it does
You start an emulator or boot a simulator, and it shows up. There is no setup on the device and nothing to add to your app. From there:
- Logs from logcat and the iOS unified log in one table that stays smooth at thousands of lines per second, with level, tag, text, regex and per-app filters.
- Performance and memory: CPU, memory, frame rate, janky frames and battery for the app you pick, memory snapshots you can diff by category, and Android heap dumps with a built-in leak finder.
- Network: a debugging proxy that decrypts HTTPS, with mocks, breakpoints, throttling, GraphQL and gRPC decoding.
- Storage: browse an app's files and open SQLite, SharedPreferences, property lists, MMKV, Realm and more in place.
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Crashes: crashes, native crashes and ANRs with their stacks, readable when you give it your R8
mapping.txt, source map or dSYM. - Sessions: record a whole run (logs, requests, crashes, screen video, touches) into one file you can open later, compare, or collect from CI.
Why Rust, and why no agent on the device
EmuLabZip does not inject anything into your app. It speaks the public interfaces of each platform: for Android it has its own async client for the ADB host protocol (no need to shell out to adb for every call), and for iOS it drives xcrun simctl. The Android and Apple code lives in separate crates behind one Backend trait, so the desktop app and the CLI use exactly the same code.
That also means it keeps working when Xcode or Android Studio update, because it depends on interfaces they have to keep.
The same data in a terminal
Everything the app shows is also a command. Start a device, then:
emulabzip devices
emulabzip logs
emulabzip mem com.example.app
emulabzip net --har capture.har
emulabzip crashes --app com.example.app
Each command prints tables for people and --json for scripts. The same engine runs in CI: emulabzip ci records a session around your test command and exits with its exit code, so a pipeline behaves as before and you get a file to open when something fails. I will write about that in a later post.
And it talks to AI assistants
EmuLabZip includes an MCP server (emulabzip mcp). Connect Claude, Cursor or VS Code and the assistant can read your logs and crashes, follow the traffic live, drive the screen and record a session. It cannot wipe or rewrite anything unless you start the server with --allow-writes, and then each change asks you first. There is a post about that too.
Try it
The desktop app has installers for macOS, Windows and Linux. The command line tool installs with Cargo:
cargo install --git https://github.com/LuisPeixoto/EmuLabZip emulabzip-cli
Then start an emulator or simulator and run emulabzip devices.
- Website and documentation: emulabzip.luispeixoto.dev
- Getting started guide: emulabzip.luispeixoto.dev/docs/getting-started/
- Source code and releases (MIT): github.com/LuisPeixoto/EmuLabZip
If something breaks or is missing, tell me in an issue. It is a one-person project and the roadmap follows what people need.
Also in Portuguese: Criei um laboratório de debug open source para emuladores Android e simuladores iOS
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