Historically, there has almost been no one doing very much in mobile app testing. Until fairly recently, app developers have started to reach out for quality and testing. However, available tools and emulators hardly support important features for mobile testing such as mobility, location services, sensors, or different gestures and inputs.

Results indicated app developing companies are facing problems as they DO NOT have

• The right tools to test
• The devices readily available
• The right testing process
• The testing experts
• An in-house testing environment
• Enough time to test

For mobile app developers, delivering high-quality apps across all of the different device and OS combinations is a major effort. Not only, it’s time consuming, complicated, and expensive, it also needs workforce of testers. As a current practice, developers often rely on manual testing of their apps. They use emulators that try to simulate the behavior of real devices, or they rely on their own collection of local devices that only cover a small set of the overall device market. They also have to address variations in firmware and operating systems, maintain operation with intermittent network connectivity, integrate reliably with back-end services, and ensure compatibility with other apps running on the device.

So, to ensure the integration of aforesaid procedures, developers are looking for easier ways to build and test across platforms. Recently Amazon has added another set of tools to its cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) that could make testing new apps a lot easier for developers.

Device Farm and its Advantages

AWS Device Farm lets developers test out the Android and Fire OS apps on a variety of devices. This new service helps mobile application developers quickly and securely test their apps on smartphones, tablets, and other devices to improve the quality of their Android and Fire OS apps. Developers can upload their apps and run tests simultaneously on all of the most commonly used mobile devices across a continually expanding fleet that includes the latest device/OS combinations.

Marco Argenti, Vice President, AWS confirmed that “AWS Device Farm gives developers a very simple and cost-effective way to test the real user experience of their apps across multiple device types at scale. And, when used along with other AWS Mobile Services like Amazon Cognito, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), developers have a full platform that makes it even easier to build, deploy, test, and iterate great mobile apps.”

1. AWS Device Farm gives developers access to a fleet of devices that includes all the latest hardware, operating systems, and platforms so they can instantly test their apps across a large selection of Android and Fire devices, and integrate these tests into their continuous deployment cycle.

2. AWS Device Farm removes the complexity and expense of designing, deploying, and operating device farms and automation infrastructure so that developers can focus on delivering the best app experience to their customers.

3. Developers can simply upload their Android or Fire OS application and select from a catalog of devices. Then, developers can configure AWS Device Farm’s built-in test suite to verify functionality with no scripting required, or they can choose from a range of popular, open-source test frameworks like Appium, Calabash, and Espresso.

4. Device Farm’s test suite lets developers specify aspects such as device configurations, language, location, app data, and app dependencies. Once the tests have run, they’ll get a report that identifies any problems with suggested actions to put right any problems.

5. It’ll also automatically identify and group identical errors to help developers sort out which problems are device-specific and which are wide-spread.

Conclusion

Life, today, is truly being flooded with mobile apps and their usage. This in-turn qualifies to the fact that, the need of maintaining the app’s quality is mandatory. However, it gets very tough for the app developers to manually ensure good quality apps. Keeping that in mind, Amazon Web Services had come up with Device Farm in the year 2015. Since then it has become a pretty simple and a secure way of app testing and has a potential to be a future trend of qualitative app development in the years to come.

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