The Device pane — see & touch the app you're building

For a mobile project, Wilow doesn't just describe the app it's building — it can show it to you, running, and let you touch it. The Device pane is a live emulator or simulator inside the project chat, with a chip straight from source code back to what's on screen.

What it is

Open any project's Control Panel and click the App Simulator card: a panel slides in from the right showing the app you're building running on a real emulator or simulator, live — not a screenshot, not a recording. Close it with the ✕ on the panel. On a wide desktop window with the phone-shaped device, the panel takes just the width the phone needs and the chat stays beside it — you keep talking to Wilow while watching your changes land on the screen. On the tablet shape, on your phone, or in a narrow window, the panel takes the full width instead (the emulator deserves the space); its ✕ slides it away again.

Every project has the App Simulator card. If the project doesn't have a mobile app yet — say, a plain website — opening it shows a short prompt instead: ask Wilow to create a mobile app for the project, and the emulator lights up once one exists. Mobile projects — Expo, React Native, Flutter, or native Android/iOS — get the live device directly.

The Android emulator (any computer)

For Android, Wilow auto-provisions a headless Android emulator on the daemon — the engine running on your computer, whether that's Windows, Mac, or Linux — and streams its display into the pane. There's nothing to install by hand. The first time you open the pane, you accept the Android SDK license inside it, and Wilow handles the rest.

Opening the simulator starts the device automatically — no button to press — and the “Starting device…” indicator stays up for as long as a cold boot genuinely takes. There is one shared device across your projects: if another project is currently using it, Wilow tells you which one and offers Move the device here instead of taking it silently.

Once the device is up, your project's own app opens on it — Wilow installs the newest build, launches it, and keeps the development server it needs running — so you land in your app, not on the Android home screen. While that's happening the pane shows “Opening your app…” over the stream and blocks taps — it only unlocks once the app is genuinely on screen with its content rendered, so you never select things on a half-loaded device.

It is one phone shared by all your projects, with each project's app installed side by side — just like a real phone. Switching projects doesn't reboot it: Wilow re-points the screen and brings that project's app to the front in a couple of seconds. All the device controls — Android/iOS, Phone/Tablet, Select, the Device Actions menu, and Run on your phone — sit in a single row at the top of the sliding panel itself, so the rest of the panel is just your app. Working with multiple monitors? The pop-out button on that same row opens the emulator (controls included) in its own window — drag it to your second screen and the chat takes the full main window; close it or click the button again to bring it back. Wilow also uses the phone on its own: while building, it starts the device in the background, installs what it built, and taps through it to check its work — you don't need to open the simulator for that.

The pane also has an Android / iOS switch and a Phone / Tablet picker. Changing either while a device is running swaps to the requested one. iOS requires the Wilow daemon to run on a Mac — on Windows or Linux the iOS option explains that instead of failing.

See and touch it

The pane isn't read-only. Tap, swipe, type, and press hardware buttons directly inside it, the same way you would on a real phone.

Select an element → ask Wilow to change it

Turn on select mode and move the mouse over the running app: a green rectangle previews whatever is under the pointer, reshaping live as you move — click when it's on the right element (on a touchscreen: press, slide, and release), and Wilow resolves it back to the exact source file and line that rendered it. The picked element stays marked until your next pick. Then just say what you want — “make this button green,” “delete this” — and Wilow edits that code, not a guess. Pick several elements in a row and each lands in the same message.

• For React Native / Expo, the mapping is exact once a one-line babel tagger is enabled in your project.
• For Flutter, the mapping is best-effort (heuristic) — a strong starting point, not a guarantee.
• On your phone, tapping an element while streaming sends the selection to Wilow as a chat chip you can add a request to before sending.
• Because all your apps live on one phone, tapping an element that belongs to a different project's app sends your instruction to that project's chat automatically — a small “→ ProjectName” tag on the chip shows where it will go.

Wilow drives it too

While Wilow is building, it can operate the emulator itself — installing the app, launching it, tapping through a flow, and looking at the result to check its own work. A “● Agent is driving” badge appears on the pane while it does. You can still tap alongside it: the emulator is shared, not locked to whoever is driving.

Run it on your own phone

The Run on your phone button on the panel starts a phone preview; when it's ready, a small dialog pops up. Install Wilow Simulator on your Android phone once (the dialog links to it), open it, and scan the QR — your app opens natively, with live reload: you watch Wilow's edits land on real hardware within seconds. Wilow Simulator is Wilow's own preview runner, version-matched to the projects Wilow builds — it replaces Expo Go, whose store versions fell permanently behind the SDKs new projects use. iPhone support arrives via TestFlight. (Projects that add unusual native libraries fall back to a direct APK build, delivered through the same dialog.)

Stream the emulator to the Wilow mobile app

From the Wilow app on your phone, you can watch the emulator and drive it — tap, select an element, or ask a question — without touching the PC, over an encrypted WebRTC connection. On the same network, this connects directly. To reach it over cellular, you add your own Cloudflare TURN credentials once — the first time you open the simulator, a small card asks for the Token ID and API token right in the pane (skip it if you only watch from the same network; you can come back to it any time). The key is free tier and per-user, never shared across accounts.

iOS

Everything above — the pane, the controls, select-to-source, phone streaming, agent-driving — works the same way for the iOS Simulator, on one condition: the Wilow daemon has to run on a Mac (Apple Silicon + Xcode). On a Windows or Linux daemon, an iOS project's device panel shows a plain note instead: iOS simulators need a Mac — use the Android device, or run the app on your own iPhone with Wilow Simulator once it lands on TestFlight.