Mock Location for Testing of Mobile Apps

How many apps on your phone today has applications that need GPS as a tool to do the task that it needs to. Be it hailing a cab, ordering food, booking a movie or the indispensability of shopping online, more often than not, we use GPS based apps all available at our fingertips. Gone are the days when asking people around a few times used to connect you and the place of the product.

Precision is the name of the game now. The applications developed need to be tried and tested. Not just that its functional requirements are easy to read and track format seamlessly.

Geo-Location Testing of Apps by using mock locations on devices

Geolocation technology has given birth to new ideas for startups which didn’t exist before. New market strategies keep bringing to light that have transformed the relationship of a company and its consumers. The ability to integrate Geolocation into our mobile technology creates solution for any industry domain.

Why is testing necessary?

A few examples of Geolocation apps are the ones that also track weather alert systems, track lifestock and location based advertisement systems. Using Geo-Tag or GPS Location of a mobile device, location aware apps are created. Geo-location testing is performed on apps that are location-aware. Which means it has to display and collect information based on the real-time location of the device, to provide real-time services to its user’s proximity.

So how does a developer guarantee that the application will be functional worldwide? Not just that, for local areas, how does he guarantee that the app will work in specific streets with crowded services and neighborhood areas?

Presently the state of affairs are such that geolocation apps are restricted to field testing and iOS/Android based simulators. Developers can also manually draw up GPX/KML files that need talented coding skills. Test teams have always struggled to test location based feature due to lack of mock location tools.

How does pCloudy allows testing of Geolocation apps?

pCloudy provides single click access to a tool to mock location on a IOS or Android device. Which is why testing geolocation functionalities is also pretty damn seamless and easy.

Similar to field-testing but only far easier. If your application under test is a location aware app and if it reads the geo-location from the device to provide the necessary results, “Set Phone Location” feature can be used to inject any location (mock location) on the earth to the device and the device will be teleported to the selected location. Simply choosing a location of choice on a virtual map, which internally feeds latitude and longitude information to the device.

This emulates the chosen location on the device as your real location. This helps you test if your application behaves properly at different locations.

Cloud-based testing for mobile applications is cost-effective. While looking for cloud-based mobile application testing tools you need to consider that it provides comprehensive coverage with more numbers of real devices. Users also download the mock location app to spoof your location to view any content that is blacked out in a particular region.