Head of Client Strategy
July 22, 2024
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If your organization is struggling to manage a growing number of mobile devices for development and testing, you may consider deploying a mobile device cloud as a solution. As mobile apps mature and become more sophisticated overtime - it’s natural to ‘graduate’ from using physical devices into leveraging a shared pool of hosted devices that can be accessed remotely by your team.
When contrasting the costs of a few physical devices versus a mobile device cloud, it’s not simply a comparison of a couple phones against the annual licensing cost of a solution like Kobiton, BrowserStack, or Perfecto. In-house devices inevitably need to be shipped between team members, updated, and maintained - often causing more trouble than they’re worth.
In addition, relying solely on local devices has a few inherent limitations. Factors like limited scalability and low device availability can lead to operational bottlenecks, which can then incur far more overhead than the cost of a mobile device cloud.
As we continue, we’ll unpack the 5 key benefits that device clouds can offer. First, let’s keep the focus on minimizing operational overhead.
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Have you ever had a bug reported on a certain type of device/OS, which then required a team member to ship a device to a developer so they could debug it locally? While overnight shipping costs here and there aren’t the end of the world, it’s one of many sources of scope creep and delays for mobile app teams.
On top of needing to ship devices around - it’s important to consider the overhead of managing the devices themselves. When they’re used regularly for test automation, they can ‘bloat’ and degrade in performance over time. This means your QA or IT department will have to troubleshoot hardware which takes them away from key responsibilities. With a mobile device cloud, the burden of maintenance is shouldered by the provider.
There’s a time and place for building an in-house device lab, which we review in the article, “Mobile Device Clouds vs. In-House Device Labs: Which is Best for Your Use Case?” Even if you partner with a vendor like Kobiton, HeadSpin, or TestGrid to streamline the implementation of a device lab, you still need to consider the maintenance activities. Mobile device clouds are great solutions for teams who have resource constraints and relatively straightforward needs.
It doesn’t take long to realize that mobile app development can be far more complex than a standard web app. You’ll need to account for various network conditions, device & OS configurations, geolocations, and user settings. While a mobile device cloud doesn’t give you as much control as a in-house device lab, your team can still mock a variety of real-world scenarios during your test cycles. By catching more bugs in a QA environment, you can gain immediate ROI from investing in a device cloud.
If you wanted to have about 50% ‘device coverage’ for the top phones in the USA, you’d need to test against roughly 10 devices. To scale to 80% device/OS coverage, it’d require more than 50 combinations of phones and operating systems. With device clouds hosted by vendors like Kobiton and BrowserStack, you can tap into hundreds of devices that would otherwise cost $100,000 or more to provision yourself - while also reaping the benefit of more real-world coverage.
Test automation in the context of mobile can be tricky to navigate. When teams rely on a single physical device that’s plugged into their local machine, they can only execute one automated test run at a time. With a device cloud, you can enable parallel test execution of 5 or more concurrent runs. This helps ensure your regression cycles don’t get bogged down by slow execution speeds and keeps your test cycles on track.
For mobile app teams - and especially ones that are remote - collaboration is key. Here’s an example of where communication tends to break down. Let’s say a tester finds a bug during a manual session on a local device. That would then require them to spend anywhere from 30-60 minutes compiling all of the information a developer would need to investigate the defect. With a device cloud, all interactions on a UI level are automatically compiled after every session, which can be immediately viewed by any other team member. Providers like Kobiton have particularly robust inspection features that allow developers to review logs, CPU usage, network usage, and other stats that are difficult to extract from a local device.
Let’s continue with the previous example. Once a tester compiles all test evidence for required for remediation, they likely have to manually upload everything in a issue tracker like Jira or ADO Boards. Mobile device clouds almost always provide out of the box integrations to project management tools that make bug submission a matter of clicking ‘submit’. This helps drives QA and development productivity.
As we established earlier, mobile device clouds offer parallel test execution for faster cycle time. It’s also worth noting that most providers also offer AI-powered capabilities that enable automation engineers to easily flag and fix broken test scripts. When engineers aren’t constantly tending to broken scripts, they can focus on scripting more tests to drive additional test automation coverage. Providers like Kobiton and Perfect also enable manual testers to convert a set of steps into Appium scripts, which engineers can quickly modify before using them in their IDE.
Developers often leverage emulators and simulators for debugging. For defects related to hardware or network conditions, it can be challenging to remediate an issue on a virtual device. This can be even more complicated if the right physical device isn’t available. When using a mobile device cloud, developers are able to log into their IDE (like XCode or Android studio) and ‘virtually connect’ directly to a device for debugging. Streamlining this process often results in a much shorter MTTR.
If your team can solve for bottlenecks stemming from difficulty with debugging, scaling automation, or compiling test evidence - it’ll remove the friction from a release cycle. Once you reclaim lost time, the productivity can translate into more frequent releases. Think of it this way. Let’s say you release every 2 weeks but schedule 5 business days for testing. If you can cut testing down to 2 days, it would mean you can deploy an additional 7 releases per year. This segues into our next point.
Mobile app users often have high expectations. Whether it’s in a business or consumer setting, we’re all accustomed to using apps that are reliable, easy to use, and largely bug-free. As you drive developer and QA productivity, it’ll be much easier to release new innovations into the hands of your user base and stay ahead of competitors in your arena.
As the saying goes, “a penny saved is a penny earned.” Not only can mobile device clouds significantly improve productivity, they can also reclaim budget that was previously consumed on other associated soft costs. This enables leadership to reallocate those resources into other areas of potential improvement.
Receiving a 5-star app review doesn’t necessarily mean more money in the bank. And receiving a 1-star review doesn’t mean you’re going out of business. Regardless, we can all agree that it’s much easier to drive revenue when an app consistently receives praise in the form of 5-star reviews from their users. While testing can’t necessarily mitigate poor UI/UX - it can ensure a business initiative isn’t derailed by frustrating defects.
Adopting a mobile device cloud isn’t just a technological upgrade; it’s a strategic move that can transform your business operations. From saving costs and improving testing accuracy to accelerating time to market and boosting productivity, the benefits are clear. As the mobile landscape continues to evolve, staying ahead with a device cloud can play a key role in your sustained success.
Shane Shelton
Sr. Director
Application Performance and Development Operations, McGraw Hill Education
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