Can the simulator be used to test a GameKit app?

I'm sure this question was asked many times before but I cannot find a good answer. In my case it just doesn't work. Here's what I did

  1. Created a couple of test user accounts on appstore connect under the sandbox section.
  2. Launched two different simulators via xcode. On each simulator I logged in into test icloud account and game center accordingly.
  3. Deployed and launched my code via xcode.

What happens is that GameKit code fails to find any peers no matter what I do. Sending Invite doesn't work either because the simulator displays an error message saying "you need to log-in into icloud account first" although it's already logged in. I tried the same code on two different physical devices with two real icloud accounts and it works as expected but it's not a viable path to develop and debug an app. I'm using the latest Xcode 16.1 running on 15.1. Anybody has any clue how to solve this ?

Can the simulator be used to test a GameKit app?
 
 
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