May 18th, 2018 by Shivani Sinha
pCloudy’s Team Outing
After relentlessly working for days and nights, we are proud to have successfully launched pCloudy 5.0. And it is special and very close to our hearts!
But, as they say ‘winning is only half a thing; having fun is the other half. We pCloudians believe in this philosophy and so after hard work, it was time for us to have fun.
We place a high value on balancing work and personal life, and hence we try to host at least one family outing every year. It gives us all a chance to let loose, have fun, and meet the people most important to our teammates! This year we decided to visit an eco – resort near Bangalore – Our Native village. Two of our colleagues, Suraj and Pradeep took the initiative of making all the arrangements.
It was a bright Saturday morning and everyone boarded the bus from office at around 10 on 21st April. Our excitement knew no bounds and after greeting each other we started our day with playing ‘Dumb charades’ in the bus. We made two teams and gave the weirdest movie names to each other which was funny to act and acting on it in the moving bus made it even funnier. Nobody realized that we had already covered the 2 hours distance and were about to reach our destination.
We reached the eco-village resort’s gate and the adventure started to unfold. ‘No entry’ was written in bold on the gate and we couldn’t see even a single human being around. Some people started to share ghost and thriller stories there. Then, the bus driver suddenly spotted a lean and short-heighted gatekeeper sitting at the corner-most place. He opened the gate, took our details and let us enter. Now the most adventurous part – there was no pitched road, and you could only find farms on both sides till the point your eyes could see. No man, nothing. Each one of us started to wonder if we have reached the right destination or is the bus hijacked and what not. After moving for around 2-3 kms, we finally saw a poster directing towards the resort. We all had a sigh of relief and the people who were most scared acted as if they knew that this is going to come.
We all entered the resort and were welcomed with garlands. We found the resort to be truly a replica of an Indian village. We could see swings made of tires, bullock carts, rabbits, chickens, turkeys all around us. After settling down, we rushed to have lunch which was well prepared with a good range of buffet.
We made different groups and played 20-20 cricket, badminton, basketball, shooting, snakes & ladders, UNO, chess; you name it and we played. Kids spent most of their time on slides, trampoline, swings or running after chicks or rabbits.
The real fun began in the evening after we had our snacks. The list of team building activities started with the ice-breaker activity – Fire in the mountain, followed by Big fish-small fish. It was a wonderful game, where each one of us had to act the opposite of what we say. Reflex action can be fatal sometimes.
Next in line were activities where we were asked to form 2 teams and named our teams as Iron man and Spiderman with Hansil and Suraj as the team captains. The anchor used to call out to collect a particular number of some random items and the teams should help their respective captains collect those number of items in the shortest time. This game actually made some of our male team mates take off their t-shirts and do a catwalk.
Another group activity was passing on the hoola-hoop to your team members holding each other’s hands and without touching the ring. The last activity was on the team selecting a song which they had to sing at their highest pitch and keep on dancing on the songs played until it stops with full zeal. Although each one of us got breathless but in order to make our team win, we played till the end. And guess what! The spiderman won, I am so excited because I was in that team.
Here is a list of quick snaps:
A grand welcome can take away all your worries. Here are a few giving candid pose.
You are “busted”. A mind boggling game to check your reflex action.
Throw the ball and hit the target! Everyone’s favourite game teaches us tactics!
pCloudy’s girls gang enjoying bullock cart ride! Ethnicity is the new modern!
Being photogenic while giving cheesy pose has its own relevance. A quick snap with pCloudy team and their closed ones!
December 29th, 2017 by Avinash Tiwari
pCloudy 2017
2018 is around the corner and it’s just the time to recap on the major events and milestones of pCloudy in 2017. We thank each one of you for your immense support and trust you bestow on us that keeps us working towards improving pCloudy to meet all your testing needs.
Let’s recap:
GROWTH OUTPACING THE MARKET: Mobile Application Testing Market is on a rapid trajectory and is currently a 3.2 Bn USD industry and is estimated to reach 6 Billion USD by 2021. The growth is not getting stagnant anytime soon. Technavio’s analysts forecast the global Mobile App testing services market to grow at a CAGR of 18.31% during the period 2017-2021. With an incessant growth in the app testing market, pCloudy made a remarkable progress outpacing the market growth and making more than a 100% jump in its user base. More than 17,000 users registered on the pCloudy platform this year.
GEOGRAPHICAL EXPANSION: pCloudy added another feather in its cap and launching its 4th data center in Melbourne, Australia. The launch of the data center is aimed at tapping the Australian app market helping our customers increase their app coverage to ANZ region.
PARTNERSHIP WITH IT STALWARTS: 2017 was indeed a great year for us as we partnered with some of the IT stalwarts like Infosys, Wipro, Hexaware Technologies, UST Global and many more.
MAJOR PRODUCT BREAKTHROUGHS: pCloudy in its incessant effort to make faster and effective, we got two major breakthroughs this year. Let’s have a look at them:
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| CERTIFAYA: Understanding the needs and analyzing the market trends, pCloudy created a milestone by introducing Certifaya – AI powered bot testing to make testing faster and efficient multi-folds. |
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| CROWD4TEST: Another major breakthrough for pCloudy this year has been the launch of crowd testing. This feature can help app testers get feedback from the real users before its market launch. |
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INDUSTRY RECOGNITIONS: We are honored to get our hard work recognized by major industry analysts this year. Let’s peep through our recognitions:
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| G2 Crowd Test Automation Grid: Having received multiple valuable feedback from real users, pCLoudy has succeeded in becoming a part of G2 Crowd Test Automation Grid. |
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PRODUCT ENHANCEMENT: We understand the importance of product enhancement in technology industry and that’s why we keep on upgrading our product to serve you better. This year we have upgraded it with 11 new features which makes this as one of the biggest product update ever for us. We have introduced features like –
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| Planner where you can get the latest stats of the market penetration of devices from across the globe. Some of the features will have a significant impact on the way you currently test your Apps. |
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| Integration With JIRA: pCloudy introduced this feature where a tester can now log bugs directly to JIRA while testing the application on pCloudy. All relevant data can be attached in a single click. |
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| JMeter: As pCloudy has always been working towards making testing fast and efficient, it has recently launched a plugin for JMeter to bring you an insight about the Performance Testing of your application. |
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A PART OF AGILE TESTING CONFERENCE, 2017: pCLoudy participated in the Agile Testing Conference, 2017 and showcased its products under two main divisions – mobile app testing platform and Robotics. It was a great show and we received phenomenal response from the audience.
A BLEND OF WORK AND FUN: pCloudy is not just committed to its customers but also to its employees. Bringing a smile on every pCloudian is a reward and acts as a catalyst in improving our performance. Every pCloudian believes in working hard and partying even harder.
We are thankful to each one of you for your trust and support throughout. Embarking on such a journey would have been impossible without you. We are proud of our achievements even this year but will strive to have more exciting starts and remarkable successes in 2018. We will continue to improve our products and make your experience with pCloudy a remarkable one.
Appy Holidays and have a great year ahead!!
December 11th, 2017 by Avinash Tiwari
Special 20% discount
Every special day is a reason to celebrate and be joyous about and to add more excitement to this holiday season; we are offering a special 20% discount on all our flagship products.
pCloudy is growing with you and we leave no stone unturned to keep you happy. To make this holiday season business worthy, here is a chance to get any of our products (Click here to visit the packages) for 20% off.
This discount is live & anyone can take advantage of this special offer until 31st December midnight. The 20% discount will be applicable to your order by applying a coupon code HOLIDAY17. This is a onetime offer and we would like each one of you to get the maximum benefit out of pCloudy.
With this, we wish you all a super holiday season and enjoy this 20% discount from the pCloudy team.
If you love your association with pCloudy, do let others know about our exclusive discounted sale by sharing it on Facebook & Twitter.
October 24th, 2017 by Avinash Tiwari
G2 Crowd
pCloudy now part of G2 Crowd Test Automation Grid. We thank our customers for making us high performer.
October 13th, 2017 by Suyash Dubey
Online Android Emulator to Test Apps
Android now occupies the number one place in the world Smartphone arena with a market share of 87% at the end of 2016 that means 9 out of 10 Smartphones in the world run on Android. With such dominance in the space, the creation of mobile apps has reached never before heights. But the constant innovation that fuels this market has major problems in terms of the development and testing timelines. Running an online Android emulator, which used to be a solution once up a time, is not good enough anymore. So what can companies and developers do to stay ahead in the development race? What alternates exist to improve your app’s usability, performance and customer satisfaction? Let us explore.
With the explosion of Smartphones, customers’ screen size is reducing. People are moving from desktops and laptops to Smartphones for their everyday work and personal needs. This massive shift from big screens to a personal device has created a huge opportunity for developers to create tools that can help people with their work and their personal needs. Users can now view their spreadsheets and book movie tickets from their phones.
Want to test your Mobile App?
Join pCloudy Platform!
Apple’s Appstore and Android Play store has become the ‘go to’ place for people to discover apps that meet their requirements. The ratings left on those apps will decide how many people will install those apps. Customers have once again become the king of the market.
Days of unique apps are over. For your every need you will find at least two or more apps, giving you a choice. So if you want people to choose your app, install it, use and positively review it, your app needs to user-friendly, work on most handsets and be bug-free.
In the past, companies and developers determined product lifecycle. They planned the updates, feature upgrades etc based on the resources and other factors. Today the scenario is changed. The Market dictates the timeline. If your app is incompatible with the latest OS, or not render properly, or suck a lot of battery juice, off it goes into oblivion to be replaced by a better app.
The fight for the screen space is constant.
You can win the fight only if you develop faster than others, test it better and offer a good user experience. That means developers will need to compress their development cycle and testers should speed up their testing while at the same time, maintain high usability and reliability of the app.
Android and iPhone both offer an easy to use platform for developers. iPhone has a few products (IP6, IP7, IP8 etc.) and versions (OS 8, OS9, OS10 etc). The permutation of devices and OS makes testing with real devices easier although buying that many Apple devices is quite an expensive investment. You don’t need an online emulator while testing for iPhone.
In contrast, Android has a highly fragmented market. Apart from different versions (KitKat, Jellybean etc), there are different forks of Android (Stock, Cyanogen, OxygenOS etc) and there are also different skins that manufacturers put on their devices (TouchWiz, Optimus, Sense etc). Real android device testing to cover all the combinations is close to impossible and quite expensive.
Enter Online Android Emulators
When they started, online Android emulators were like a boon to developers. They could cross test their apps across different devices without physically buying the phones. Most of the Android emulators were easy to set up and a fairly inexpensive solution. Most importantly, online Android emulators could mimic hardware and software behaviour making easy for developers to identify unexpected behaviour during the early stage testing.
But as the market for apps grew, the demands on the app became even higher. Testing all the features of the app on an Online Android Emulators was not providing the full picture of how the app would behave on a customer’s phone.
For example, a user installs a new app on the phone and the next day he notices the battery is getting low very fast. Looking at the battery usage, he discovers the culprit is the new app and bam! He hits uninstall. He then visits the Playstore and writes a negative review of the app’s battery-sucking problem. The next 20 people who see that review will not install the app.
These kinds of bugs cannot be easily identified using an online android emulator. Apart from that, online emulators are slow because they have to replicate both software and the hardware components. thus slowing down the whole testing cycle.
Online android mobile emulator stimulate android devices on a PC to test an app on a variety of devices and API levels without the need for physical devices. Nox is the best online android emulator although BlueStacks is the best android emulator for online games. Online android emulators come with predefined configurations for various Android phone, tablet, Wear OS, and Android TV devices. There are many online android emulators for iOS available in the market.
Online Android emulators also have other limitations that make them unsuitable for large-scale testing. There are a limited number of OS versions you can run on an Android emulator. Even on a good PC with HAXM acceleration support, you can run approximately 8 emulators at a time. Even if you manage to set up all the online emulators you need, one small problem can send the whole system crashing forcing you to start all over again.
So what can app developers do to speed up their product lifecycle while releasing a relatively bug-free app? Is there any alternative for Online Android Emulators?
Testing on real devices has a few important benefits. Your testing can be in real conditions i.e. weather, location network accessibility, interruptions like SMS, calls etc can be tested accurately. You can also validate the screen brightness, visibility in different lighting conditions. Testing on a real device will be a lot faster than on an Android emulator.
The biggest problem in using actual android phones is the cost of buying all the phones you need to test. There are approximately 11k Android phone models in the market making it financially impossible to test on all available Android devices. This is one reason Online Android Emulators became famous in the initial stages.
You can run only one test at a time. If you have staff in another city or country, they cannot access the device. If you need to install an app, you have to do it manually on every device. Apart from that, there is also a question of logistics, maintaining the devices, updating them, etc all of which are time-consuming tasks.
One tactic used earlier involved a combination of using online Android emulators during the early stages and a small selected list of real Android devices during the beta testing. While this would work for a localized team, it still does not optimize device usage and covers a tiny portion of devices while the fragmentation continues. Thus it is not an optimal solution.
Is there a third alternative that can beat the disadvantages of online android emulator and real devices testing?
In recent times, a new mode of testing is gaining popularity among both amateurs as well as professional developers. It is called Mobile cloud testing.
What is Mobile cloud testing?
Testing on real devices using the cloud as the Interface is the new way of balancing the real android testing while making it economical and scalable. As a developer, you need not own any phones or buy expensive software. You connect to a lab that has a huge selection of Smartphones, select the ones you want to test on and start, it is that simple. You can run functional tests, automated tests, performance and other forms of tests easily. Since the interface is cloud-based, you can test from anywhere in the world, at any time.
There will be some changes in the way you set up your test, install an app, etc. All the testing though will happen on actual devices under user-level conditions. You can set the location, observe CPU utilization, battery drainage and pretty much anything else that you can do with a device in your hand. These are the things you can never test with an online Android emulator.
The best part is that you need not invest in any special infrastructure for such a facility. There are independent services providers who can allow you access to the device on a cost per use basis. You can even reserve devices in advance if you want to plan a battery of test over an extended period.
Opting for mobile cloud testing service gives you access to real devices at a fraction of a cost of setting up your own lab. There are no recurring charges as most of them use a ‘pay as you go’ model. You can spend all your time in testing rather than worry about the infrastructure, maintenance and other problems that come from the ‘owning’ model.
While there may not be a cost associated with getting Android emulators, they need a lot of expensive hardware to run a sufficient number of an online android emulator. Mobile cloud testing does not have a problem.
Using Mobile cloud testing, you can cover more ground over a large number of devices than if you were using either only real android device testing or the online android emulator. For example, if you have 10k scenarios to cover, you can spread it over 1k devices through automation rather than 1k test scenarios over 100 different online android emulator.
One of the biggest benefits of testing mobiles over the cloud is that you are more likely to discover bugs that affect real-world customers than what an emulator can reveal. From a user satisfaction perspective, this is probably one of the biggest advantages mobile cloud testing has over online android emulator.
Most of the app development work has moved to the agile methodology which means testing will run almost parallel to development work. You will need a way to speed up the testing process to meet the sprint deadlines.
Using a mobile cloud, it is easy to streamline the testing process whether you are using a DevOps or an agile approach. Continuous testing is a lot easier to streamline over the cloud setup rather than via online Android emulators or even with real devices.
Many development teams are spread across the globe. Cloud setup gives them an easy way to test seamlessly from different geographies.
Security for Mobile apps testing
Different apps have different needs in terms of security. An Astrology app that gives general predictions may have little data security requirements while a banking app might need the testing to be done in a secure environment. Such clients can always go for a private cloud or even opt for on-premises setup. When you use a good solution provider, you can just hook up your existing devices to their setup and give access to your cross-border teams to test on the devices.
Testing performance issues, be it CPU load, battery discharge or performance over 2G, 3G and other networks work a lot easier when you use the mobile testing via the cloud platform. You can select which network mode you want to be on and apply the test. This kind of flexibility is difficult and sometimes, impossible using an android emulator.
Mobile Apps Performance Testing
Apart from the need to test for compatibility with existing apps, battery usage, network usage etc, and mobile apps will need to go through a round of performance testing. Due to the ever-increasing storage space in a Smartphone, users tend to store a lot of content on their phones. So it is necessary to find how the increase in storage affects the application performance.
For example, if you are developing a photo gallery, how does your app perform when accessing 5 GBs worth of pictures and videos, v/s accessing 50 GBs worth of pictures and videos? Does it slow the pre-fetch? Customers are very unforgiving of apps that slow down their phones.
In case your app has a server-side component, it is important you run a performance test to verify how many concurrent users the server can handle. There have been many instances where e-commerce sites crashed being unable to keep up with increased demands during holiday sales.
These are a few areas that we cannot test on an online android emulator.
A customer kept waiting is a customer lost
A couple of years ago, it was acceptable to wait for two-three minutes to download an image on a phone. But today if your app takes longer than few seconds to start up, it is killed and replaced. The tide has shifted to the customer’s side in the Appstore and Playstore. The only way to win this game is to be Nimble, easy to use and not crash the phone.
Thanks to Mobile cloud testing, you don’t have to wait for the slow, unreliable online Android Emulators anymore. Testing on Mobile cloud gives you the opportunity to cut your infrastructure cost, speed up your testing cycle, spread your testing over a larger set of devices and gives you close to real-world results. As the completion heats up for the screen space, you have one tool in your kit that can help your app survive the tough jungle of user reviews.
Want to test your Mobile App?
Join pCloudy Platform!
August 7th, 2017 by Avinash Tiwari
Non functional testing
pCloudy in partnership with TechGig is bringing in a series of Webinars.
Here is a webinar on Non Functional Testing – Mobile Apps by Nilesh Tarale, Vice-President Smart Software Testing Solutions.
To view Webinar Video directly Click Here
May 9th, 2017 by Suyash Dubey
pCloudy’s Data Center
Ever had apps on your phone which suddenly crashed it and you couldn’t figure it out?
In today’s age, If you have a smartphone that needs to get you through most of the day, be it work or play, you must have experienced frustrating bugs on that app that is either slowing down the phone or stops you from using it when you need the most. So you uninstall it and be done with it. Try asking any app developer or tester what it is like to test usability of the app in thousands of devices across screens, operating systems and the carriers.
This is where pCloudy comes-in. A one stop solution for Developers and Testers to certify their App across variety of devices.
How does pCloudy work?
pCloudy has found an incredibly simple way of allowing users to remotely test their apps on different real and physical devices by using just a modern web browser. Alternatively, users can access the devices directly from their IDEs like (Android + Eclipse studio).
Behind the scenes:
Use of Physical devices: Mobile App Testing is most effectively when done on a real physical device. That’s the reason, pCloudy currently has 500 + Android and iOS device (real device, no emulators) across various manufacturers and versions.
[A Device Rack in the Data center which contains pCloudy Hardware and set of devices]
Kind of hardware involved: pCloudy has a customized hardware setup, which runs the software to allow communication with real mobile devices. All the mobile devices are connected to the hardware using USB cables.
Network Setup for Devices: All the devices have a Wi-Fi connection. To ensure uninterrupted connectivity to the devices, all the racks are installed with dedicated Wi-Fi controllers and Wi-Fi access points. The Wi-Fi access points are deigned for interference mitigation and Noise (SINR) improvement. Besides, many of the devices also have real SIM cards.
[Data Center: All the above is located in a secure, 24×7 operated data center]
When it comes to certification of Apps, one of the biggest concern for Users while using a solution like pCloudy is security and safety of their Data.
Why we decided Data Security was Critical?
It was important for our customers to feel safe about their Apps and data that they upload on pCloudy servers. Many a time these are not-yet-released app and related data. Today pCloudy is working with Global enterprises who are extremely concerned about safety of their Data.
Security of Data Center: A major component of the entire pCloudy offering is the data centers where physical mobile devices are connected. These devices are then made accessible through cloud via the web browser to the customers. pCloudy has hosted their cloud in a data center which meets all the global standards, including compliance with SSAE16 (SOC2) and ISO 270001 standard. pCloudy has 99.982% uptime commitment on the DC infrastructure which is measured quarterly, a failover redundancy mode for equipment’s setup and everything that does not get in the way of a creating an uninterruptible, stable working mobile network environment for the apps, round the clock, 24X7.
Secured Cloud Drive: Data uploaded by user (Apps/Test Data) is Stored in secured folder on our server in DC. User space is protected by username and password. Data is further protected by a layer of encryption. No access to user data by pCloudy admin.
Device Clean up: Device gets cleaned up automatically after each use. As soon user releases a device, user installed Apps get uninstalled, data uploaded get deleted and device gets powered cycle.
April 3rd, 2017 by Avinash Tiwari
March 7th, 2017 by Avinash Tiwari
Thank you very much for stopping by our booth at
Agile Testing Conference 2017!
We had an amazing time last week in Bangalore and hope you did, too!.
It was a unique pleasure to have the opportunity to introduce you pCloudy, our mobile application testing platform and robotics division. We understand that you may have other obligations during the Conference and you still spent time at our booth and we are grateful that you did.
February 23rd, 2017 by Avinash Tiwari
