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Ask HN: Mobile developers, how do you do testing?

by softwareman on 5/22/14, 8:35 AM with 7 comments

I would want to know how do you do testing right now for your mobile apps across multiple devices, especially in the world of Android when there are tons of devices with many versions of configurations, pixel density, screen size, etc.

Do you use any tools? If yes, how good are they?

  • by wnm on 5/22/14, 10:07 AM

    I develop my apps with phonegap[0] and ember.js[1], this way I can use tools like firefox's responsive design view[2] to make sure it works on different screen sizes/resolution.

    In terms of testing, I use all the current tools that are available to web developers (automated tests for my javascript code with mocha[3], chrome developer tools for debugging, etc)

    I do testing on an actual device as late as possible, when my app is actually already finished and well tested. In case I need to debug on the device there is remote debugging with chrome on android[4], which lets you debug your android app with chrome developer tools.

    For automated integration tests there is also appium.io[5]. You can write integration tests and let them run for ios and android.

    [0] http://phonegap.com/ [1] http://emberjs.com/ [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Responsive_De... [3] http://visionmedia.github.io/mocha/ [4] https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/remote-debugging [5] http://appium.io/

  • by atox on 5/22/14, 2:39 PM

    The company I'm currently working with purchased 30+ mobile devices.

    I'm getting more and more convinced that this is the only way to guarantee that your site/app will work perfectly on all of these phones and tablets.

    Some emulators can be a pita to install (iOS emulator only works on OS X, windows phone emulator needs Visual Studio on Windows 8 on hardware that supports HyperV) and they're still not 100% consistent with what will happen on the real device.

  • by omgmog on 5/22/14, 9:08 AM

    The developer tools in Chrome are a good starting point, you can emulate the screen size, user agent and orientation of a number of devices. A quick Google surfaced this article about the emulation: http://www.realeyes.com/blog/2014/02/19/a-quick-guide-to-chr...

    Having a range of devices at hand helps too.

  • by vktheitgirl on 5/23/14, 4:38 PM

    I recently tried genymotion.com. I am pleased with it so far in terms of testing on android. Of course, it is not the same as testing on real devices. For now, I am just testing using this. Later, I am going to ask friends and family to test my app on their various devices.

    I haven't tried this this but another suggestion I read somewhere is to go to Bestbuy and test it on as many devices as you can :)

  • by gspyrou on 5/30/14, 7:20 AM

    You could take also take a look at Nokia Remote Device Access http://developer.nokia.com/resources/remote-device-access (Android Nokia X , Windows Phone Lumia , Nokia Asha).

  • by petervandijck on 5/23/14, 11:46 AM

    1. Make a list of current target devices for this project (depends on project). 2. Buy a representative set of them (like 5 or 10) 3. Test on those real devices.

  • by qgaultier on 5/23/14, 5:22 PM

    on android, I use genymotion as a quick test tool. But my company also own many devices Os * density * size for final tests.