A new magical way to test your apps on real devices

Apps are the ‘new’. We live in an era where you click on your mobile screen to see your cup of ‘cuppa’ at night. With the advent of technology and the Internet, mobile phones and services are becoming more personalized than ever before. And to fulfill these services, numerous applications appear every day to adapt to different platforms. Among applications, the demand for consumer applications is the highest, but various business applications are also evolving to support various businesses. Due to the increasing demand for mobile applications, manufacturers and application developers are shifting their focus towards creating strategies and roadmaps before launching their applications. It is easier to launch an application with features and functionality required by a particular service, but it is quite critical to have a rigorous and flawless mobile test plan prior to implementation.

“Users delete 70% of applications within minutes of installation”

Testing is a crucial step, where developers can guarantee the quality of the application they are going to launch. Nobody wants to launch an application that is full of errors or that allows a lot of pop-ups. A faulty GUI or confusing UX may be the reasons for your app’s sad demise before it creates its own space in the app market. That is why mastering the art of mobile application testing has become the main goal of any developer to stay in the market.

Mobile app testing presents many new kinds of challenges

• There are a lot of real devices available on the market and for which developers have to go through a lot of testing.

• There are frequent changes in the mobile applications. It has become difficult to keep up with the changes.
• Availability of the right mobile application infrastructure, the right device matrix, and the right set of tools is a very selective process!
• Simulating or reproducing errors reported by users is extremely difficult, as they are mostly related to a specific device. Errors are always progressive in nature. And that is why the development cost increases significantly.

Current focus

The typical testing approach involves the use of simulators / emulators with a combination of in-house mobile lab (selected set of devices). These approaches do not provide complete test coverage. Errors are found when an application is launched on the market. It leads to a high overall cost of quality. Organizations have started to consider automation to reduce cycle time and increase test coverage. But without a proper mobile laboratory infrastructure, you don’t get good results.

Solution: the future is the cloud

Why is cloud-based mobile app testing the way to go?

• Produce better quality applications by testing on the widest possible range of available devices, while reducing capital budgets.

• The cloud provides an infrastructure ready for automation runs, resulting in increased test coverage.

• Quickly reproduce errors reported in the market.

• Allows easy collaboration between multiple teams.

• It drives the agile development process by allowing easy integration within a continuous process.

• Save costs, since geographically distributed teams can access the same laboratory.

• The cloud allows you to access devices that have been stopped in the market. For example, there are still many users in India who use old versions of Android like 2.3 on the phone, like Samsung Galaxy Star Duos.

Conclusion:

Efficient use of the cloud can shorten cycle times, improve application quality, and reduce capital budgets by undoing the chaos of mobile application development and testing.