pCloudy understands that businesses need their apps to be rolled out faster than before, without bugs, crashes, functionality issues, UI glitches, memory drainage and well, everything wrong with every app you uninstalled on your phone within minutes of using them.
We simplify testing. More importantly, this platform will equip, enable and guide you to provide single-click access solutions to the battling issues that can easily drive a developer nuts. This platform allows you to test real Android and IOS devices directly from your browser using real Mobile Devices to click-and-perform Manual and Automated Testing for maximum coverage.
Here are the most frequently used App Testing Use Cases you might be interested in.
pCloudy announces the launch of its device data center in Australia
It’s been a great year for us in terms of customer acquisition. We got a great response for our last data center in the US. We asked our customers which location they would like us to start next. UK and ANZ emerged as a preferred choice.
We are happy to announce our new device data center in Melbourne, Australia.
This means that you can now test your Apps on Australia specific Mobile devices with local Telco Networks such as Vodafone, Telstra and Optus.
We hope this move will help you further increase your test coverage and increase your savings on device testing.
Continuing this journey, we will setup the UK Data center very soon.
Keep sending your suggestions and voices. We are listening!!!
We are committed to keep you ahead of others: pCloudy is one of the fastest to release support of Android 8 Oreo devices on cloud, as always
Google has just released the Android 8 Oreo, With the Android 8.0 Oreo version released in the market, we expect many users to adopt 8.0 quickly.
Have you started thinking: is your Android App compatible with this latest release?
pCloudy is happy to announce that we have released our support for Android 8.0 Oreo on our cloud. pCloudy customers can use the Android devices with Android 8.0 Oreo for testing their applications either manual or automated way.
Manual Testing
You can access the Android 8 Oreo device like any other Android device and check the compatibility of your app.
pCloudy recommends all the customers to start testing their Android apps on Android 8.0 Oreo to identify glitches.
We are committed to keep you ahead of others: pCloudy is one of the fastest to release support of iOS 11 beta devices on cloud, as always
Apple has just released the iOS 11 public beta for their upcoming iOS 11 release expected soon. With the iOS 11 beta version released in the market, lots of enthusiastic Apple users are already moving to iOS 11.
Have you started thinking: is your IOS App compatible with this latest release?
pCloudy is happy to announce that we have released our support for iOS 11 on our cloud.pCloudy customers can use the iOS devices with iOS 11 for testing their applications either manual or automated way.
Manual Testing
You can access the IOS 11 device like any other IOS device and check the compatibility of your App
Automated Testing
If you are using Appium, we are happy to announce support of Appium 1.6 to take care the execution of Appium scripts on IOS 11.
pCloudy recommends all the customers to start testing their iOS apps on iOS11 to identify glitches.
Mobile apps can often crash for many reasons. Nothing is as excruciating as memory leaks. It starts with your app crashing often, or becoming slow or maybe making your entire phone slow down, taking longer time to load activities. Memory leaks are notoriously hard to detect, and thus can easily surprise you. Have we ever thought why most of the users uninstall the application after some use?
Which is why it is critical for Developers to understand the memory consumption by any mobile application. How do you detect memory leaks during Mobile Application Testing? And if so, how can you prevent them from hogging mobile resource consumption?
Memory is one of the key resources of the mobile device.And memory leaks in Android is an important thing to be kept in mind. Java is a garbage collecting language, which removes the need for developers to dig deep to manage allocated memory. This reduces the chances of any segmentation fault crashing an app or any unfreed memory allocation from eating up space of the heap area, thus creating a safer code.
However, a garbage collector is never an insurance against memory leaks. There are other ways by which memory can be leaked within Java. This means that your android mobile application is still pretty prone to wasting unnecessary memory allocation and crashing with out-of-memory (OOM) errors.
Figure 1: Image Credit- Toptal
Why are Memory Leaks Bad?
Cause: Memory leaks occur when some variable of the application still has references to some objects that are unnecessary, no longer in use or used to be with the app anymore, is bloating the allocated memory heap and the Garbage Collector is not being able to release that memory.
Effect: Android devices mostly run on phones with limited memory, so as a result of too many leaks, the app runs out of available memory. This triggers more frequent Garbage Collector events which paralyze the device (Stop-the-world GC events) by almost stopping the rendering of UI and processing of events. This leads to an Out of Memory Exception and translates to the user as the app being unresponsive.
Testing for Memory Leaks
Memory Leaks are caused by the failure to not be able to de-allocate memory that is no longer in use, which is why they cannot be identified during black box testing. The best phase to find the memory leaks is when developers are developing the application, at a code level.
It’s best to check for memory leaks during unit testing. However, testers can follow these tips:
Release Unused Memory: Memory leaks can be present because of the bad design of the application and thus might consume lot of memory when the application is in use
Test on Multiple devices:The memory consumption by the application should be monitored while doing the system & functional testing. One shouldn’t rely on a single device testing as there are plethora of devices in the market.
Detecting Memory Leaks
There are quite a few techniques and tools devised by developers to pin point memory leaks. Android’s very own Android Studio has a powerful tool to monitor not only memory usage but also for network, GPU and CPU usage as well, called the Android Monitor.
Memory Monitor in this helps track memory usage, find de-allocated objects, identify memory leaks and helps get an overall sense of how your app allocates and frees memory. It’s done in three steps:
1. During and use and debugging of app, track the memory monitor. If the memory usage graph rises for your app and doesn’t fall even if put in background, it’s a memory leak.
2. Using the Allocation tracker, you can check the percentage of memory allocated to different types of variables in your app. This gives you a sense of how much memory is consumed by which object.
3. Create a Java Heap Option to create a heap dump that keeps a snapshot of the memory at any given point of time, thus providing the data consumption data.
Despite Android’s monitor to detect memory leaks, there are a few platforms from developers that help extract memory consumption data without so many steps for faster testing cycles.
pCloudy’s very own platform for example, generates the statistics for Memory consumption while doing the normal functional Mobile Application Testing on real mobile devices.It also generates other vital data such as CPU consumption, battery consumption & data consumption for testers and developers who reiterate several test cycles across multiple physical devices.
UI testing for iOS app is a way to validate & interact with the real UI of the app. This testing process will check if UI elements are designed and implemented the way it should be by interacting the UI elements by tapping, swiping, scrolling and verifying the behavior. For iOS version 9.3.5 and above, Apple has introduced XCUITest by deprecating instruments with UI Automator making it mandatory to use XCUITest for iOS automation.
Xcode has XCUITest framework integrated allows to easily develop UI tests for user’s interaction with the application. Implementation of UI tests for iOS apps with XCUITest is same as unit tests in XCTest.
pCloudy supports both XCUITest for iOS version 9.3.5 & above and instruments for lower version. DesiredCapabilities like automationName, usePrebuiltWDA, acceptAlerts are required to run the automation scripts in pCloudy platform.
1) Creating IPA file using xcode for testing
a. In General tab, Select Provisioning profile in Signing(Debug) and Signing(Release)
b. Select Provisioning Profile
c. Archive the build
d. Export the build
e. Choose Development Team ID
f. Choose to export for all compatible devices
g. Select the appropriate location to save
Now you have properly signed to run automation in pCloudy platform.
2) Running Automation Script @ pCloudy
a. Login and upload ipa file
b. Upload the App to cloud drive post login
c. Create XCUITest project in Eclipse or Android Studio.
The following capabilities need to be set after creating AppiumDriver object to run XCUITest above v9.3
