Test your Android app on many devices

A few days ago I saw two tweets from  Pamela Fox where she complained about how hard it is to make an Android application work on all the known devices:

She is right, even by following the best practices published by Google, you never know whether your app will perform the same everywhere until you actually test it on all the hardwares, all the resolutions  and all the Android versions. This fragmentation is what makes programming on the Android platform so hard.

Yesterday I have thought about a possible solution that would rely on Crowdsourcing. This is how it works: Testers register to the platform by listing all the devices they can test the applications on. Then for each test, they would have to answer to a set of simple questions written by the developer(s). Of course, the platform will reward the testers in one way or another (or each developer would reward the testers in their own way). Hopefully some solutions like this one exist like  The Beta Family. To be honest, it doesn’t seem like they have a lot of testers/developers relying on their service and there are certain things that I would do differently (like making sure that the beta can be downloaded immediately).  So it would be interesting to rely on other type of platforms.

In fact there are other cloud based solutions, where different devices are available for your tests on the Cloud. Good examples of these are: Perfecto Mobile and Device Anywhere.  I haven’t used one of these platforms yet, in fact I am not a test freak I just focus on testing on 3 different devices (3 completely different configurations, resolutions and Android versions) and I make sure to follow the best practices to deliver a high quality application. But if you have, please leave a comment and tell us what was your experience like.

Also, please drop comment if you happen to know other platforms/solutions to help solve that particular problem.