Hi, this is A Minute of Overpass.
My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now this week, I wanna talk about why it's so important to do actual physical device
testing.
So this week I wanna talk about testing, more specifically, I wanna talk about device testing.
Now it's one thing as a software developer or as an app developer, it's easy to use like
an emulator or a simulator and just do everything on the desktop.
In fact, you can even make an Android app using the simulator alone and never have to
actually have an Android device.
However, the problem with that is that as soon as you get on an actual device, a lot
of times you run into trouble, so it's best to have physical devices around to test on.
Now, for us, now I have like in front of me, a whole bunch of devices.
I've got several iPhones, this is an Android, my Nexus 5, I've got my iPhone 6, I've got
my iPod Touch 4, I've got an iPad Air, I got the Nexus 10 tablet, and I'm always buying
more and more devices and the Google Watch is the latest thing, which is kinda cool.
The reason why I say testing on a device is important 'cause if you've ever done anything
where you've released an app and haven't tested it on a device, you find out you have different
kinds of issues.
To give you an example, we released an e-book last year for Christmas and what happened
was everything worked fine in the simulator and I didn't really do any device testing,
I could've done 'cause I have all the devices, but you know, I was kinda lazy and when we
put it on a device we found out it ran into memory errors.
And the reason for this is that even though the iPad simulator on the Mac OS, it works
exactly the same way, it doesn't support push notifications but it does support all the
things that an iPad does.
So it was really good for testing however, it has all the power of a Macbook so once
we got it on to an actual physical device, it crashed.
So it would crash for memory warning on a certain page.
It was kind of embarrassing to actually put it through the app store and it was Apple
who actually rejected it.
So from then on, we have to test on physical devices.
Now, with iPhone that's easy 'cause iPhones are pretty standard, they use the latest version
of iOS, they're really good about upgrading so you don't have to do that much testing.
With Android, it's like an unwinnable battle.
You will never get to test everything.
There's too many, thousands of devices out there, all the operating systems.
You still have people out there with 2.3 although it's getting better, Android 2.3 and upwards.
Like with Ear Spy, we had crashes, crash reports all the time on Google Play but it's just
something we have to put up with.
Now if it's insignificant, we keep an eye on it and if it's significant, we investigate.
But sometimes, like people say, it could be anything 'cause it's so difficult to troubleshoot
these kind of things.
Like with Ear Spy there's some people who say that it doesn't work on the Galaxy S4,
however, other people say it works great on the Galaxy S4, so you never know.
We're trying to go by comments and stuff like that, you don't know if it's just how they
expect the app to work or whether they're doing something wrong, or if it's genuinely
crashing and not raising a crash report.
However, there are services out there.
Last year I used this service called App Thwack.
A-P-P T-H-W-A-C-K, which was really really good.
What it'll do is it will upload your Android file or your iPhone IPA and upload it to the
cloud where they have like all these different devices and it'll run the app on all those
devices and give you screenshots of how it looks on each one of them, which works really
well.
They've recently been bought up by Amazon so they have a whole new Amazon web services,
cloud farm kind of thing, which I'm gonna check out soon.
So there are alternatives to doing actual device testing but you should have at least
one device, if you're doing iPhone and Android, or whichever, you should have at least one
physical device in order to test on.
Now, what you shouldn't do is go out there and buy like the top of the range because
most of the users might not have top of the range, especially with Android.
Android is the cheap mobile phone, so we should look lower down on the spectrum and get something
like a hundred dollar phone or a hundred pound phone and test on that.
So that's it for this week.
My advice this week is you cannot rely on just emulators online, you have to do some
device testing.
And believe me, I've burned by it several times before in order to know better.
So that's it for this week.
Now just to let you know, we do have a blog, so we publish several blog posts a week on
www.overpass.co.uk, they're really good.
You can register for the newsletter so you don't miss anything, just to keep you informed.
And thank you so much for all the comments.
I know somebody commented recently saying we need to go deeper with the topics, I'll
work on that, I'll work on that, I'll work on some deeper topics.
Thank you, I think it's Targa studios.
Anyway, that's it for this week, I'll talk to you next week.Bye!
Hey, I really hope you liked that video.
Now I do this once a week, so if you wanna hear more or you wanna hear more about our
experiences with the app store, either Google Play or iTunes, please go ahead and subscribe
to the channel and please like this video and leave a comment.
I love reading the comments, I love hearing what you have to say, even if it's just hello
or whatever.
And like I say before, If you're not sure what to say in a comment, like I never know
what to say in a comment, I'll make it easier for you.
Like if you liked it, just go ahead and say "Gnarley", which is an 80's term, or if you
didn't like it, just say "Bogus", and didn't think any of it, just say "Eh".
So that would be a big help.
And another thing you could do, which I'd really appreciate it, if you're on the app
store and you wanna try one of our apps, look up some of the Overpass Apps applications
either on iTunes or Google Play and leave a review and let us know what you think about
it, either good or bad.
We're all trying to build up in the market so that would be a big help.
So that's it, I'll talk to you next week.