Google Brings Android Emulators, iOS Simulators, and More to Project IDX

Google today announced several enhancements to Project IDX, its experimental AI-powered cloud-based developer IDE, key among them Android emulators and iOS simulators.

“We’re bringing the iOS Simulator and Android Emulator to the browser,” the Project IDX team writes in a new post. “Whether you’re building a Flutter or web app, Project IDX now allows you to preview your applications without having to leave your workspace. When you use a Flutter or web template, Project IDX intelligently loads the right preview environment for your application — Safari mobile and Chrome for web templates, or Android, iOS, and Chrome for Flutter templates.”

There’s more: The team has also added support for new templates for Astro, Go, Python/Flask, Qwik, Lit, Preact, Solid.js, and Node.js development, several improvements to the Nix package management and system configuration tool, network port auto-detection, integrated command-line tools, scripts, and utilities, and simpler Docker integration capabilities.

Google launched the Visual Studio Code-based Project IDX back in August as a web-based developer experience built on Google Cloud and powered by the Codey foundational AI model. Since then, it has expanded its AI capabilities to 15 countries, with more on the way, and it has seen some interesting use cases, including the Firebase blog internally at Google and Tanaki, an AI-enhanced content creation app.

You can learn more—and join the waitlist—on the Project IDX website.