How to mock network requests in iOS
One of the challenges of mobile application development is to ensure that the application is resilient to various error responses from the services that are consumed by the application. Mobile devices are more susceptible to network connectivity issues, timeout etc. So we need to take extra care to make sure that we test all error scenarios and handle them in a meaningful manner.
What and Why of Mocking
Even though we are convinced about the benefits of testing server errors, these services are running in Production serving real customer requests. So it is not possible to make every service API to return these various error responses. So in order to test these scenarios, we need to simulate the server requests locally such that it returns the responses that we want to test. This is what we mean by mocking data requests. These “server” requests will not actually hit the network; the mocking code runs locally and returns the data that corresponds to success or error response.