Native Plugins on iOS without the iOS Platform added

Its a long question, and the answer may be obvious, but I am new to mobile app development so please bear with me.

  • I’m developing on Windows, and so have only the android and browser platforms added to my app. Thus far I was using ionic serve -l (lab) to debug and it was serving me well but recently I added quite a bit of Native Functionality like MediaCapture, Base64, etc.

  • Since I started getting the error ‘cordova_not_availible’ quite often, I switched to using an Android Emulator (which I was previously not using because it is slow, doesn’t have access to the internet (Very important for the app) and I was having trouble figuring out how to add hardware support for audio, video and image recording as well as playback).

  • I then started using the ionic dev app with my iPhone. The problem is that now it just says that none of the plugins are installed. I suspect this is because I don’t have the iOS Platform added to my app but I am not sure since when I use the NativeAudio Plugin it doesnt tell me that the plugin hasnt been installed. Rather it tells me that the asset is not found at the path I am specifying. (This path works when I call it as ‘var newAudio = new Audio(path)’, so clearly it exists).

What would be the easiest and least time consuming way to debug my app to test Native Functionality while also being able to connect to the internet (to make a call to a Google API through the app)?

Thanks for your patience.

vs slowness: Use Genymotion.
vs. no internet: All emulators usually have internet…

Why do you think that?
Are the plugins suported by the Ionic DevApp?

Using HAXM actually made it faster than the Genymotion Emulators, but it still does not have livereload so it takes way more time than the ionic lab. As for the internet, since it didnt immediately connect to my computer’s network I didnt really put too much effort into connecting it since I assumed that it would just end up slowing down the emulator further.