It would be great if the simulator could be configured to act a bit more like an actual device when it comes to network requests (which ultimately take place over BLE via GCM).
I know from actual use on my D2 Bravo that requesting the aviation weather for the nearest stations typically takes between two and five seconds in total, the majority of which is the communication with GCM and handling of the data by the API since my server returns the weather data in about 250ms. However, on the simulator the total time taken is close to instantaneous.
Yes, I know this is because it's a desktop machine and there's no BLE and GCM-related overhead to slow down communications. But the lack of any delay on the simulator makes testing edge cases and anything associated with the delay (such as showing a "downloading" message) a bit of a hassle. I either have to make temporary code changes (which I hate doing as you risk forgetting about the test/changed code) or I have to constantly build and deploy to the actual device.
As a result, I would like to see a configuration option on the simulator to set a 'latency delay' amount in milliseconds. This delay time would then be induced before the associated callback following a JSON or web request and could be used to simulate both the delay associated with BLE communications and also a slow web server on the backend.
Cheers,
Douglas