One of the biggest problems that developers face with Android is the wide range of devices that run the OS. Different hardware, screen resolutions, Android versions, etc. make it extremely difficult for devs to ensure that their apps will run correctly on every single device. Apkudo is a service looking to change that by helping developers test their app on nearly 300 real-world devices.
Here's how it will work: devs submit their app to the Apkudo team, who will then run the app on some 289 different devices and return the results back to the submitting developer. Pretty awesome, no? Here's the real kicker: they are able to test every screen and feature on each app on all 289 devices in less than a minute. That's pretty impressive if you ask me.
They will use external cameras to capture videos and images of the entire process, so the dev can refer back to each piece of media and determine what exactly went wrong.
Apkudo is set to be formally announced at AnDevCon on November 6th for an initial price of free, making this service even more impressive. Eventually they will also offer a premium service that will offer even more tests. Very cool stuff.
[via Gigaom]
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13 Comments
Wow - this is incredible for app developers. I cannot wait to test my apps on these devices.
Nice, app quality will increase with utilization of this service for sure
Sweet... this will be so useful for me!
That's amazing, although the logs of the devices in which the app crashed would be better.
Just the fact that you can get a list of working devices and make the adjustments on market availability will probably take like 90% of the hassle of releasing a new Android app.
This should have been thought of a long time ago. Hell, even if it was a feature Google ran as part of the app upload process.
Motorola offers a similar service to Motodev members, but it focused on Moto devices.
Google should actually offer this to developers.
Great article, but, next time can you provide an actual link to the website? Maybe it's there, but, I didn't see it. Thanks!
Awesome indeed. But it sure does sound like one of those great ideas that never actually gets to see the daylight.
Awesome indeed. But it sure does sound like one of those great ideas that never actually gets to see the daylight.
I'm sure it will see plenty of daylight.
At http://www.lesspainful.com we're testing on physical Android devices as well but the approach is quite different from what I've read on Gigaom. We are really looking forward to see what Apkudo is releasing at AnDevCon. We welcome anything that can improve the general quality of Android apps.
See you at AnDevCon!
Looking at the description of his presentation this is just a distributed Monkey run. That's not the same as testing every feature. Especially if he's only letting the application run for one minute.
Google to buy this in 3... 2...