Device farms: The revolution in mobile app testing

Mobile application testing is a significant and integral part of the QA process for determining the app's success in the market. However, testing and ensuring optimal functioning of the wide range of apps present today and the numerous platforms on which the apps perform have made app testing tedious for enterprises. According to a survey by Appfigures, in the 3rd quarter of the previous year, there were 3.55 million apps alone on the Google Play Store, which was a rise of 1.3% from that of the 2nd quarter. The coming in of device farms has made this much simpler, more efficient, and quicker, changing the course of app testing in terms of device accessibility, real-time access, and improved effectiveness. 

This article will walk us through the basic concept of a device farm, its advantages, and how HeadSpin's device farm helps enterprises streamline app testing for a better user experience. 

What is a device farm?

Device farm is a cloud-based service enabling organizations to test their mobile apps and websites on multiple devices. This process makes mobile testing more efficient and cost-effective by helping to test on real devices without purchasing or maintaining physical device labs. A device farm comprises the following:

• Latest and older devices
• Browsers
• Browser versions
• Mobile platforms that help QAs to execute manual and automated tests in real user conditions and simplify detecting and eliminating bugs before moving into production and disrupting customer experiences

Device farms can be leveraged in two primary ways:

• The app can either be automatically tested with multiple frameworks
• The app could be manually loaded and executed on the device

Leveraging device farm amidst the widespread prominence of mobile applications

Today, the smartphone market is disrupted by innovative applications with a large number of users. Especially the parameterization and customization across the Android landscape have escalated app usage and also led to fragmentation issues. Device farms have successfully delivered an efficient way to test apps across the fragmented system by providing access to real devices and web browsers over the cloud and also allowing testers to detect both functional and nonfunctional errors without any physical lab infrastructure.

Read: A Comprehensive Guide on Automated Testing

Two types of device farms

iOS device farm

When it comes to mobile app testing, leveraging an iOS device farm can significantly streamline the process. An iOS device farm is a collection of various iOS devices that developers and testers can use to ensure their apps work seamlessly across different iPhones and iPads. This testing approach becomes crucial as the diversity of iOS devices continues to expand.

Why choose an iOS device farm?

• Diverse Testing Environment: With an iOS device farm, you can access a wide range of iOS devices, including the latest models and different screen sizes. This diversity helps uncover compatibility issues that might arise on specific devices.
• Real-world Testing: By testing your app on real iOS devices, you can replicate the real-world user experience. This is particularly important as variations in hardware and software can affect how your app functions.
• Accurate Bug Identification: Testing your app on multiple devices from the iOS device farm can help you identify and address bugs more accurately. This minimizes the chances of negative user reviews due to device-specific issues.

Implementing testing on an iOS device farm

To make the most out of an iOS device farm, follow these steps:

• Test a Variety of Scenarios: Ensure that you test your app under various scenarios, such as different iOS versions, screen sizes, and orientations. This comprehensive testing can uncover hidden issues.
• Automation Tools: Consider using automation tools to run tests across multiple devices simultaneously. This approach saves time and provides consistent results.
• Monitoring Performance: Apart from functionality, monitor the app's performance on different devices. This includes factors like load times and resource consumption.

Android device farm

In the world of Android app development, an Android device farm proves to be an indispensable asset. The diversity of Android devices, screen sizes, and versions requires thorough testing to ensure a seamless user experience.

The advantages of an android device farm

• Fragmentation Management: Android's fragmentation can pose challenges for developers, but an Android device farm can help tackle this issue. It allows you to test your app on a range of devices to identify and fix fragmentation-related problems.
• User Satisfaction: Ensuring that your app functions well across a variety of Android devices contributes to higher user satisfaction. Negative reviews due to device-specific issues can be mitigated through rigorous testing.
• Optimized App Performance: By testing on an Android device farm, you can fine-tune your app's performance. This includes optimizing resource usage and minimizing crashes on different devices.

Effective testing on an android device farm

To make your Android device farm testing effective, consider these steps:

• Cover Diverse Scenarios: Include a mix of devices with varying screen sizes, resolutions, and Android versions in your testing suite. This comprehensive coverage minimizes surprises post-launch.
• Regression Testing: Regularly conduct regression testing on the devices in your Android device farm. This helps ensure that new updates or changes haven't introduced unforeseen issues on specific devices.
• Security Testing: Don't forget security testing. Different devices might have varying security implementations, and your app should remain secure across the board.

Why should you use a device farm?

Most software that wants significant user adoption needs to be mobile-friendly. Whether it is an app or a website, these need to run seamlessly on mobile devices of different screen sizes, resolutions, mobile browsers, and OS. Adding to this, the current escalation of mobile device fragmentation caused by the high number of device manufacturers, models, hardware specifications, and software versions across the market has made it almost imperative for enterprises to leverage device farms. With this large fragmentation, users are accessing the internet from diverse tech environments. Android device fragmentation also makes creating large-scale software that works uniformly across different platforms complex. With several Android OS versions available and operational, the Android applications need to be tested across thousands of device-OS configurations to be usable by customers at a regional and global scale. Today, along with a myriad of Android device farms, the market offers iOS device farms to help avoid inefficiencies in testing for fragmentation and the rising use of iOS devices across the globe.

The key reasons why you should leverage device farms include the following:

• Provides developers access to operate devices, applications, and websites
• Eliminates the requirement for any setup or upkeep of any physical devices; you might utilize devices listed in the device farm catalog
• Offers functional testing environments and helps rapidly and effectively test their apps on different devices.
• Helps in the testing and development process by the QA team
• Simplifies restrictions and complexities
• Determines app performance
• Addresses typical hardware issues
• Helps with test logs and crash reports
• Generates device logs
• Offers performance information like CPU graphs, memory graphs, and thread graphs
• Maintains tracking battery level
• Improves network strength

Read: A comprehensive guide to iOS app testing

Benefits of mobile app testing on device farms

1. Access to a Wide Range of Devices: Device farms provide access to various devices, models, operating systems, and configurations. This ensures that your app is tested across different environments, uncovering potential issues that might arise on specific devices.

2. Cost-Effective Testing: Setting up an in-house device lab can be expensive and time-consuming. Device farms offer a cost-effective alternative by providing access to multiple devices without significant investment in hardware.

3. Scalability: Device farms allow for scalable testing solutions, enabling simultaneous testing on multiple devices. This helps reduce the time required for testing and accelerates the mobile app's release cycle.

4. Real-World Conditions: Testing on device farms simulates real-world conditions, ensuring your app performs well under network conditions, battery status, and user interactions. This enhances the app's reliability and user experience.

5. Enhanced Test Coverage: Using device farms ensures comprehensive test coverage by running tests on various devices. This minimizes the risk of missing out on device-specific issues, leading to a more robust and reliable mobile app.

6. Integration with Automation Tools: Device farms often support integration with popular test automation tools, allowing for seamless automation of repetitive and time-consuming test cases. This improves testing efficiency and helps maintain high-quality standards.

Best mobile device farms for testing

1. OpenTest: OpenTest is an open-source test automation tool that supports testing on both mobile and web applications. It allows developers to create and execute tests on real devices and simulators. OpenTest supports integration with CI/CD pipelines, enabling automated testing. Its flexible architecture makes it a viable option for teams to customize their testing solutions.

2. STF (Smartphone Test Farm): STF is an open-source platform for managing and using large numbers of smartphones and tablets. It allows developers to control devices remotely through a web interface. STF supports integration with various automation frameworks and can be deployed on-premises, providing flexibility and control over the testing environment.

3. Appium: Developers can leverage Appium on native, hybrid, and mobile web apps. They can test on real devices and emulators, providing a versatile solution for mobile app testing. It also supports many programming languages and integrates with various CI/CD tools, making it a popular choice for automating mobile app tests.

4. Selendroid: Selendroid is an open-source framework for test automation of native and hybrid Android apps and the mobile web. It supports real devices and emulators, offering a flexible and scalable testing solution. Selendroid can be integrated with Selenium Grid, allowing for parallel test execution and improved testing efficiency.

5. OpenSTF: OpenSTF (Open Smartphone Test Farm) is another powerful open-source device farm that enables remote management of smartphones and tablets. It allows real-time remote access to devices, providing a convenient way to conduct manual and automated testing. OpenSTF integrates well with various automation frameworks.

Benefits of building your own device farm

As mentioned previously, the fragmentation issue increases due to multiple operating systems, and this can be addressed with own device farms.

Following the pros of having your own mobile device farm

1. Reduced costs: Several expenditures, like electricity costs and other initial costs, make up the majority of usage costs. Being able to perform more tests at a time period will decrease costs, and overall investment will turn profitable.
2. Simplified access to authority: Device farms offer complete sovereignty over the infrastructure and restrict unauthorized access points from infiltrating
3. Improved maintenance: Device farms are an enabler of small localized lab maintenance expenditure that reduces costs and efforts to be dedicated to maintaining numerous devices
4. Consistency of outcomes: As the same device can be utilized for different types of devices, the results are generally very predictable. It provides complete authority over who can access the devices and for how long.

Disadvantages of building your own device farm

Building your own device farm offers a myriad of benefits but teams should consider certain potential obstacles:

1. Bandwidth: A specialized lab engineer and other skilled resources are required if the device farm is extensive and scattered for monitoring system stability, device cleanup, and much more.
2. Device diversification: To accelerate app development and testing, focusing on a smaller number of the most practical devices is wise. For compatibility testing, for instance, cloud device farms are preferable. The cost will rise in direct proportion to how diverse the local lab is planned to be.
3. Upfront expenses: The cost of purchasing devices, adding hosts to the lab, and making an initial setup investment should be higher. Additionally, the cost of continuing to purchase newly introduced products and maintenance costs for software and hardware components are high.

What are the benefits of leveraging third-party device farms?

In several scenarios building your own device farms can cost significant expenditures and might be harder to scale. However, several enterprises opt for third-party device farms as this offers the following advantages:

• Helps increase platform coverage and can be expanded by considering various devices
• No requirement of handling device management
• Simplifies scaling your testing efforts in the cloud compared to on-prem options
• Increases access as it can be accessed from any location, making workflows easy even for cross-border teams
• Supports CI/CD pipeline integration
• Significantly less expensive than your own on-site device lab
• Offers access to diverse device types and manufacturers, including even obsolete ones, and both legacy and contemporary OS versions

Check: Merits of on-prem real device and real device cloud for mobile app testing 

The global device farm of HeadSpin 

HeadSpin offers its secure global device infrastructure, a cloud-based device farm that enables QA teams to access and connect to thousands of real, local devices across different geographies, helping to increase the test coverage extensively. HeadSpin’s rich device infrastructure supports enterprises in performing AI testing of distributed nodes or edges.

The HeadSpin device cloud allows significant opportunities for cross-border teams to connect and perform end-to-end tests seamlessly by allowing teams to access physical devices remotely. The cloud comprises Android, iOS, and desktop browsers, including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Opera.

HeadSpin’s device infrastructure also ensures complete security for the users. This cloud is SOC 2-compliant, where a third-party security validator executes a security assessment on the Headspin network and cloud, and the entire HeadSpin Platform is certified in passive reconnaissance, automated vulnerability scanning, and manual testing. HeadSpin also leverages PBox, a secured appliance with a number lock, to store its real devices in various locations.

The device infrastructure helps perform geolocation testing on real devices against any geography-dependent factors and ensures optimal performance and user experience. The data science capabilities of the Platform help test the actual user experience across different global locations while maintaining security and optimal performance through the single-tenant deployment model.

Bottom line

The advent of device farms has significantly driven the testing fraternity by providing greater access to test devices and more accurate, fast, and reliable results. Prior to these farms, testers were faced with unprecedented challenges in identifying performance issues and finding the right combination of devices, browsers, and OS for executing the tests. Though virtual devices, simulations, and emulations have helped improve the testing realm a lot, device farms have been a revolution in helping enterprises test under real scenarios despite not possessing a wide range of devices.

FAQs

Q1. How do private device farms help enterprises in remote device testing?

Ans: Private device farms can enable engineering teams to access devices for testing in a secure and cloud-based platform. The primary advantages include the following:

• Users can remotely connect to any device whenever and from any location
• Identify and debug issues quickly
• Run codes on real devices instead of simulators and emulators
• Access third-party tools

Q2. What are device farm test reports?

Ans: After tests are completed on devices from the device farm, a test report is generated that contains high-level results, low-level logs, and pixel-to-pixel screenshots, and consequently, performance data is updated.

Q3. What is meant by remote access interaction?

‍Ans: Remote access enables users to swipe, gesture, and interact with a device through their web browser in real time. One can install apps on a device running in a remote access session and then render customer issues or reported bugs. During a remote access session, a device farm collects details about actions that have taken place during the interactions.