Just a few days left for the new year so we thought of recollecting all the major events and achievements of pCloudy in 2019. Before we start we want to thank all of you for the constant support and faith in us that gives us the confidence to reach new heights. With that said, here is a quick recap of 2019.
Achievements and Recognitions
1. Users
As we grow in popularity, we have witnessed tremendous growth in the user base and we are forging ahead towards the 100K user milestone. The total device hours utilized by our clients also crossed the 1 Million mark. There are many factors behind this growth like a quality product, 24/7 support, competitive pricing, etc.
With more than 25K social media followers, we have built an evergrowing pCloudy community that helps us enrich our product and provide better services. We provide solutions to 20+ global giants with device labs located at 3 different strategic locations around the world.
pCloudy is integrated into more than 15 tools and frameworks that enhance the testing experience. pCloudy’s manual and automation certification is also gaining popularity as it helps users to understand the product and perform testing effortlessly.
2. Recognitions
G2 Crowd has recognized pCloudy as a high performer in mobile app testing and test automation in 2019. There are many quality standards that need to be met to get into the high performer category. pCloudy was acknowledged as a high performer due to the trust and rapport we maintain with our clients.
3. Clients and Partners
This year was really prosperous for us as we added many big names in our clientele like Conduent, Sapient, Swiggy, Migo, to name a few. Apart from that we also partnered with Global giants like Hexaware, HCL, Quality Arc, UST Global, and many more.
Product Enhancements
Our focus is on constantly upgrading our product and introduce new features to make mobile app testing much faster and easier. Here is a list of some of our key product updates.
•Android 10 before competitors: We were the first to provide devices loaded with Android 10 for testing on the cloud.
•iPhone 11 and iOS 13 before competitors: We also surprised our users by being the first to bring the iPhone 11 with iOS 13 on the cloud to test their apps.
•Faster Appium test execution: We further increased the efficiency of the Appium tests by reducing the execution time.
•Espresso through Orchestrator with Live view: Now Espresso is available through Google’s latest Test Orchestrator which lets you use the full power of Espresso and run more modular and stable tests. Live View now is supported by Espresso also.
•Audio Interaction testing: pCloudy is the first to introduce this unique feature that enables users to test their app using the Audio in/out function in the devices. This is a big development and it will help in testing voice-enabled apps.
• Admin Module: Now there is a multilevel user administration system where a system admin can create a team and a team admin. The system admin has more authority than a team admin and it can distribute the testing minutes among the team members.
•Video-based navigation for iOS: Now you can see actual device video on iOS devices which gives you much better performance for high-resolution iOS devices that last year.
Events
As always we were the show stopper at many events this year. We got good exposure and the crowd welcomed us with curious eyes. People came up with their queries and were eager to know more about the product.
Appium conference: We got good brand exposure as we were the platinum sponsor of the Appium conference 2019. We used this opportunity to grow our network among industry leaders and we also got some new clients at the conference. pCloudy’s booth was the crowd-puller and the keynote by Avinash was well received.
pSTC: The Pune Software Testing Conference organized by STePIN-Forum was another great event for us. We were the Exibhitor Sponsor of the conference and we used this platform to connect with the software executives from around the globe.
D3: Organized by USTGlobal, one of our most valued partners, the D3 DevCon was a huge success for pCloudy and people showed great interest in our product.
QAI STC: Being the Title Sponsor of the conference, we proved to be the cynosure of all eyes. The conference started with the keynote by Avinash on the future of testing. We got a chance to meet the testing experts from around the world and get familiar with their views on app testing trends.
Competitions and Celebrations
There is a saying, “work like a captain and party like a pirate”. pCloudians work hard to exceed our customer’s expectations and pCloudy makes sure that pCloudians celebrate their achievements. We are proud of our achievements even this year but will strive to have more exciting starts and remarkable successes in 2020. We will continue to improve our products and make your experience with pCloudy a remarkable one.
Hackathons: We organized two in-house hackathons this year where our teams got a chance to work together to solve a problem and show their competitive spirit. It was undoubtedly a unique and exciting experience for the teams.
CSR: This year at pCloudy we hosted children from Lakshya Udaan Home – an orphanage located in Bangalore as a part of our social initiative. It was a delightful experience as the kids drew their favorite superheroes, enjoyed the snacks and watched cartoon movies.
Sports and Games: There is a famous quote by Jim Rohn that says, “Take care of your body, It’s the only place you have to live.” We know that sports and games are the best way to keep the body and mind fit. This is why we at pCloudy participate in sports events like marathons and cricket tournaments. We also organized a games carnival at pCloudy and it was a big hit.
Festivities: While we work hard to meet our deadlines and deliver quality services, we also celebrate all the festivities and achievements in a grand style. We had team outings, pot luck, and other celebrations that strengthen the comradery among the team.
These are some of the highlights of the year 2019 at pCloudy. This year was full of achievements and celebrations as we reached many milestones in our journey. We hope that the next year will be as exciting as this one and we will observe the attainment of corporate aims.
Lastly, we wish you good health, happiness, and success. Wishing you a wonderful year ahead!
We are very excited! V.5.2 of pCloudy has been released with a number of exciting new features and product improvements. This update brings some path-breaking features, some revamped ones building on previous experiences, more mature than ever before.
Check it out yourself!
a)Test local or Staged sites with Local site emulation: It’s a path breaking feature for enterprise mobility. For all the users who have been asking for a solution to test their private servers on pCloudy devices before deploying them on production, we have a good news for you.
Now, you can access your site behind a firewall, on a staging server, or locally with pCloudy before it hits production.
Since private servers are internal to your network, they have no public access which makes it difficult to test on a device on cloud. Local Site emulation Testing provides a platform to test private or internal servers on any Android device present on pCloudy. Find the details about this feature here.
b) Test your app with Face ID feature: Apple introduced the ability to perform authentication via FaceID to enable secure and effortless access to the device. But it turns out to be a hindrance for mobility teams while testing their iOS apps on devices over cloud. To ease out the process of authenticating Face ID manually every time, you can now bypass the FaceID verification in your apps using our utility.
With this feature released, you can instrument your iOS app for both TouchID and FaceID on pCloudy. Isn’t it a bonanza for iPhone users? Click here to find out more about this feature.
c) Inspecting Element using Appium Desktop: Appium Desktop is a point-and-click interface for using Appium and inspecting your app’s structure. With this new feature you will be able to run Inspector sessions on pCloudy. You just have to login in to your registered account, set up the desired capabilities for your test appropriately, and you’ll be able to drive your app remotely using Appium Desktop. Read More
d) Releasing Follow Me Officially: ‘Follow Me’, the one-of-its-kind feature to speed up the manual app tests has been available on beta version for you to test your apps manually and report us the issues. After a rigorous quality assurance done for the features and fixing most of the issues reported, we are now releasing ‘Follow Me’ officially to manually test your apps in synchronous mode and accelerate it exponentially. Read More
Robot Framework is a generic keyword-driven test automation framework for acceptance level testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). It has an easy-to-use tabular syntax for creating test cases and its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java. Users can also create new keywords from existing ones using the same simple syntax that is used for creating test cases.
Appium Desktop is a point-and-click interface for using Appium and inspecting your app’s structure. With this new feature you will be able to run Inspector sessions on pCloudy. You just have to login in to your registered account, set up the desired capabilities for your test appropriately, and you’ll be able to drive your app remotely using Appium Desktop.
Let’s understand this in detail:
Overview
Appium Desktop is a new open source GUI application for Windows, Mac, and Linux which gives you the power of the Appium automation server in a more organized manner with a flexible UI. From an Appium Beginner’s perspective – if you want to write test scripts with Appium, you would need 2 things.
First, you would need to start the Appium Server. And second, you would also need a mechanism using which you can identify the controls (buttons, text boxes etc) in the mobile app which you want to automate.
So Appium Desktop is a combination of two essential components of Appium:
Appium Server: Server instance for enabling testing (and test automation) of apps.
Appium Inspector: For inspecting and getting all the details of UI elements of your apps.
Advantages of Appium Desktop
The Appium Desktop tool enables users to work with Appium on their desktops and use Inspector for yet better analysis of their apps.
Allows using desired capabilities and presets configuration for convenient use.
Provides the ability to switch between web-view and native app view from inspector.
Provides an action recorder and the code generator.
How to install Appium Desktop
Refer the link given below to know how and from where to install Appium Desktop.
1.Open Appium Desktop in your system and click on Start Inspector Session as shown in below screenshot.
2. Click on Select Cloud Providers.
2.1 Click on the pCloudy logo and then click on done.
2.2 You will be directed to the desired capabilities page of pCloudy in Appium Desktop.
2.3 Enter the below mentioned field details
pCloudy Host
pCloudy User Name
pCloudy API Key
2.4 Once field details are inserted, set the Desired Capabilities.
These are used to inform Appium Server that what kind of platform and application you want to automate. Click here to know about Desired Capabilities.
Note:
By default, Booking duration is 10 minutes. If you wish to change the device duration, you have to change the number of minutes in the desired capabilities. For example, if you to keep the duration for 15 minutes, you have to set desired capabilities as ” pCloudy_DurationInMinutes”, 15 “
3. Click on Start Session once you have entered the field details and set the Desired Capabilities.
4. Once session has started, login to your registered pCloudy account .
After login go to Reports section and then go to My Active Session. Click this icon present under Action. You will be directed to LIVE VIEW page.
Note:
Device will be connected as per the set Desired Capabilities. Once your app gets launched on the device you will able to see Appium Desktop view.
5.Click on Select Element to start inspection .
Example: In the below screenshot “Refuse” has been selected.
6.Once you select the element you will be able to see interactions .
Note:
There are three interaction given in Appium Desktop contributors. These are “Tap”, “Send keys” and “Clear” as shown in the screenshot.
7. According to the selected interaction action will be performed on the device page.
As shown in the screenshot Tap has been selected.
8.Click on this X icon to End the session.
Note:
As soon as you end the session device will get released from Live view.
While Apple fans are eagerly waiting for the new iPhones to be released, pCloudy committed to provide you with the newest, the fastest brings iOS 12 for you to test your apps.
iOS 12 is focused on improving the performance of iOS devices as a whole. Since this big feature announcement can’t be shown through screenshots, instead you need to experience it first-hand to find what’s new. Unlike previous iOS updates, iOS 12 focuses on performance especially on speeding up older devices.
Let’s find out the important and some hidden features in this update:
Device compatibility: This has been a highly compatible release update for iPhones till date. If your iOS works on iOS 11, iOS 12 will work on those phones. This means that all iPhones from iPhone 5S onward will be compatible with iOS 12.
Smoother and faster
As mentioned earlier, the prominent feature of iOS 12 isn’t something that has to be explained beyond screenshots. Infact it’s something that offers you to experience on your own. Instead of stuffing too many new features into iOS 12 and adding to some of the already irritating bugs we all experience, Apple is using iOS 12 to focus on bettering the overall performance of its iOS device lineup across the board. Apps should open faster, scrolling should be smoother and crashes should be fewer.
Detailed battery info
To find out what’s draining the battery on any mobile device is something we all want to learn more about. In iOS 12, you just need to open the Settings app, select Battery and you will have detailed information that you might need. New charts, breakdowns and graphs show you exactly what was using your battery and, perhaps most importantly, when it was used.
Alternate appearance in FaceID
There have been many issues reported in the past for the iPhones that support Face ID. Users have had trouble getting authenticated by Face ID while wearing a hat, sunglasses etc. that could change your overall appearance, will get the ability to register a second appearance. The new setting is found in Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Alternate appearance.
Indeed, this same feature can be used to register a second face to Face ID to give access of your phone to a second person. Just ensure that if you want to remove the second appearance (or face) you will need to reset Face ID.
Automatic OS updates
A new feature in iOS 12 will automatically install iOS updates on your device without requiring you to manually approve it. You can enable automatic updates in Settings > General > Software Updates > Automatic updates. With this feature enabled, whenever an update is released your iPhone will automatically update while you are away from your phone for long.
There are multiple other updates and additions in this iOS 12 which you can leverage and assure the quality of your app by testing it on the latest version of iOS now available on pCloudy.
For Apple lovers, Apple’s annual hardware showcase is more like celebrating Christmas in September. Apple employees work hard in the Cupertino workshop throughout the year to be ready for this day, when CEO Tim Cook takes the stage and offers the world a brand new iPhone. Infact 3 new iPhones.
Following last year’s iPhoneX, Apple announced iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR. There was also a session showcasing its most powerful wearable till now – Apple Watch Series 4.
Don’t worry if you have missed the event. We have all covered it all for you. Read on our blog to find out all about Apple’s big event.
We will cover about the iPhones announced later in the blog. Here we will have a look at the other product line updates apart from major mobile product announcements and how well those products are doing and more. Here is the highlight:
Cook talked about all the original Apple TV programs that’s been announced so far. In addition to that, Apple just signed deals for two movies: The star wolves and elephants.
Apple is about to ship its 2 billionth iOS device.
The iPhone XS uses recycled tin and bio-based plastics (and more), part of Apple’s clean and renewable energy push.
Updates to the HomePod to makes it more useful.
Price drops on the existing iPhones, with the iPhone 7 starting at $449.
You’ll be able to update to iOS 12 on Sept. 17 and MacOS Mojave on Sept. 24. (Is your device upgradeable to iOS 12? Find out more here
Now let’s have a look at the iPhones announced in detail.
iPhone XS and XS Max
Announcement of iPhone XS and XS Max come as a relief to iPhone fans who have been busy speculating and eagerly waiting for months for this big announcement. No more wait buddies! Here is a sneak peek at the 2 iPhones announced:
The iPhone XS Max is bigger than the Note 9, and both XS Max and the iPhone XS get a makeover inside and out.
The new Core ML engine for game speed was highlighted in the mobile version of Elder Scrolls: Blades and Galaga.
They incorporate the industry’s first 7nm CPU, the new A12 Bionic.
New cameras supplemented with AI-enhanced capabilities such as Smart HDR and facial feature detection (“facial landmarking”).
They boast better battery life.
Both support dual SIMs with an eSIM and a physical nanoSIM.
iPhone XS starts at $999, the iPhone XS Max starts at $1,099. Both are shipping on Sept. 21.
iPhone XR
Since it is difficult for everyone to afford iPhone flagships, so Apple announced iPhone XR. It has an LCD-based, 6.1-inch “Liquid Retina” display.
It’s bigger but less expensive than the iPhone X.
It too incorporates the A12 Bionic chip, the same wide-angle camera as the XS models, and the same AI-driven camera features.
Six finishes, four capacities, starts at $749. Preorders start from Oct. 19 and shipping from Oct. 26.
This implies that time has come to bid goodbye to iPhones SE, 6S and 6S Plus. In other words, bid farewell to iPhones with headphone jacks.
Here’s a look at the new iPhone prices compared at different locations.
Apple Watch Series 4
Thanks to its new zero-bezel design and having replaced the button with haptic touch regions, the new series of the Apple Watch increases its face size to 40mm and 44mm.
Comes with a bigger display and a smaller bezel, which offers 30 percent more screen space to display fitness stats, sport scores, and calendar information.
It has a better microphone and a speaker that Apple says is twice as loud as last year’s model, to make it easier to take phone calls, use the Walkie Talkie functionality, or bark commands at Siri.
A new dual core 64-bit processor, designed in-house, gives this one twice the performance speed, and a few new sensors make it possible for it to better track your health.
The Apple Watch now sends notifications when your heart rate is too low, or if your heart rhythm is irregular—helping to detect and diagnose problems early on. It can also tell if you’ve taken a hard fall, which will trigger an option to make an emergency call (literally Apple’s version of “help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!).
Most importantly, a new sensor in the Series 4 makes it possible to measure ECG, something that’s never been possible before in a consumer device. The FDA even gave it a seal of approval.
The watch starts at $399 for GPS, $499 for cellular. If that sounds like a serious chunk of change, some good news: The Series 3 gets a drop to $279.
Conclusion: As pCloudy has always been committed to provide you with the newest, the fastest, this time again we commit to provide you access to these new iPhones at the earliest. Keep a watch at this space for our new Phones announcement.
As per our initiative to engage with enthusiastic and bright-minded app testing professionals in the industry, we at pCloudy held a user meet-up, pCloudy ENGAGE, Mumbai edition for our enterprise customers in Mumbai on 2nd of August, 2018. With so much of hard-work and planning put behind the event, it turned out to be a big success where we could discuss about some insightful experiences and the best practices in mobile app testing space from our customers.
In our pursuit to look for innovative ideas to solve software quality and testing related challenges of mobile applications pCloudy continues to focus on three major themes at pCloudy ENGAGE, Mumbai edition.
Focus on USERS: First hand feedback from the customers is unmatched and that has always been on our priority list. We got many insightful suggestions and feedback to make our product robust and futuristic which made the event even more productive.
Focus on GROWTH: The event was all about mutual help to grow each other’s businesses. We brought forth some of the hidden gem features of pCloudy that can change the game for enterprise mobility. In return we received invaluable feedback and suggestions to better our product.
Focus on FUTURISTIC FEATURES: We have always endeavored to be the frontrunner in the market. With every update release we try to strengthen the platform in line with intelligence to meet the market demands and accelerate delivery.
The keynote speaker for the day was Mr. Avinash Tiwari, our co-founder who spoke about the fast-paced growth in the industry and the evolution of mobile app testing. He also spoke about how Continuous testing and delivery has accelerated the delivery of apps from months to days and has also improved the quality of apps. But, he posed a serious question – seeing the pace of growth and advancement in the app test industry what is going to maintain the quality @speed beyond continuous testing. The future of app testing! Features like – bot test, predictive analytics, parallelism in manual app tests and crowd tests can change the game of next gen app testing.
Next was the turn of presenting the hidden gems of pCloudy – the features that can level up the app testing for enterprise mobility?
The first hidden gem was the introduction of an important capability for cross browser testing which can make web app testing a breeze. Heeding to the growing demands of our users, we have introduced the Launch and Upload browser feature for our Android users which will give him the freedom to choose the version and the browser that he wants to use. This is going to save their testing time and efforts to a great extent and also give better results for their cross browser test.
Next hidden gem showed how you can turn your remote device in-hand USB device and work wonders like inspecting object elements using Appium inspector. You can run ADB commands or get debug info like an in-hand device connected and it can run on any open source tool without any integration required.
The last but of course the game changer hidden gem, Follow Me was introduced which can speed up the manual app test exponentially. It is a first of its kind solution where you can test your app in synchronous mode on one device and it can be replicated on multiple other devices saving your app test time by 50%.
The hidden gems were well appreciated by our user community and some of our customers came forward to share their insights and experiences with all of us.
Special thanks to Anil Dashrath Sonone, Project Manager from Infosys, and Karthikeyan M, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer from AQM Technologies for sharing wonderful insights and experiences as a first hand customer with all of us.
Giriraj, our VP Sales felicitating Anil Dasharath Sonone from Infosys
Giriraj, our VP Sales felicitating Karthikeyan M from AQM Technologies
The event ended on positive note followed by cocktail and dinner.
Thanks a lot to you all for making it worth it! We are coming up soon with another edition of pCloudy ENGAGE in your city. Stay tuned!
We are committed to keep you ahead of others: pCloudy is one of the fastest to release support of Android 9 Pie devices on cloud
pCloudy is happy to announce that we have released our support for Android 9 Pie on our cloud. pCloudy customers can use the Android devices with Android 9 Pie for testing their applications manually or through automation.
We request all our users to start testing their apps on Android 9 Pie and share their suggestions and feedback for improvement.
At each step of our journey, we aim to make your app testing robust and simpler. That’s why your feedback and requests are so important for us. We tried to incorporate them into a release structure again that makes pCloudy work better and faster for you.
So here, we bring to you the fresh set of release updates that have been addressed and deployed in pCloudy 5.1.
Simpler Appium Integration Architecture: Here comes the bonanza for our Appium users! We have released a newer and simpler Appium integration architecture to simplify your Appium test execution on Android and iOS devices with pCloudy. The newer architecture make developers’ life simpler with lesser changes in the code. The older architecture demanded using APIs and also changes in your code that required some level of expertise. We addressed this issue and have come up with a simpler architecture where you need to mention some desired capabilities instead of calling APIs or doing changes in the code to run the Appium scripts. And wonder what! it just takes few minutes to integrate your existing Appium scripts with pcloudy. Check yourself here.
pCloudy Appium Capabilities
DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_Username”, “Enter your email Id”);
capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_ApiKey”, “Enter your API Key”);
driver = new AndroidDriver(new URL(“https://device.pcloudy.com/appiumcloud/wd/hub”), capabilities);
Cross-browser testing made simpler: There are many widely used web browsers, but not all browsers, and versions of those browsers, work the same. A website may not look or function identically on each one, which can lead to lost revenue for an enterprise. We addressed the issue of choosing from the fixed set of browsers previously available.
Heeding to the growing demands of our users, we have introduced the Launch and Upload browser feature for our Android users which will give him the freedom to choose the version of the browser that he wants to use. This is going to save their testing time and efforts to a great extent and also give better results for their cross browser test. To know more about it Click Here.
Faster Upload of Apps: We received multiple requests to speed up the process of Upload and synchronization of App/Data into the cloud. With some changes in the process, we have now succeeded to reduce the app upload and synchronization time by 42%.
As you know, during app synchronization, the platform automatically synchronizes your data with all the 4 data centers of pCloudy. Earlier, the process was done in a series where synchronization once completed in one data center will then start in the 2nd one and so on which took a few minutes to complete. We have now changed this to a parallel process, which makes your testing 2x faster.
App upload time saved in pCloudy 5.1
TouchID for iOS devices no more a blocker: Apple introduced the ability to perform authentication via TouchID to enable secure and effortless access to the device. But it turns out to be a hindrance for mobility teams while testing their iOS apps on devices over cloud. To ease out the process of authenticating TouchID manually every time, you can now bypass the TouchID verification in your apps using our utility. The bypass TouchID feature will be available for iOS devices version 10.0.0 or above. To know more about it Click Here.
Note: This feature will for now be available only for iOS and won’t support Face ID.
Integration with Slack: Since many of our customers are moving towards Slack, there was a huge demand to integrate Slack with pCloudy to enable their broadly distributed teams collaborate well. We noticed this change and hence we integrated Slack with pCloudy. It will now be easier for you to share bug related data and artifacts like Logs, screenshots etc through our Slack integration. To know more about it Click Here.
