Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices are everywhere and more companies launch mobile and web apps that need to be tested daily to assure capability and quality. Sauce Labs, Inc. an already leading provider of automated testing services is upgrading their cloud automation testing services with the addition of pools of real devices.

In today’s announcement, Sauce Labs mentions that while the test pools have less device types there are more devices available than ever connected to the company’s cloud automation services. Currently Sauce Labs provides more than 75 device and platform combinations of iOS and Android simulators and emulators and this is supplemented by real device cloud. With a larger volume of real devices, Sauce Labs hopes to separate itself from the competition providing maximum coverage of devices but lower wait times on testing.

The Real Device Cloud, as Sauce Labs dubs its new feature, is available currently in beta to business and enterprise clients.

“Developers have learned that trying to manually test apps on their small set of in-house mobile devices is a time consuming, ineffective and expensive,” said Lubos Parobek, Vice President of Products at Sauce Labs. “Today’s release provides mobile automated testing across emulators and real devices to address this acknowledged pain point head on.”

Highlights include instant availability to cloud-enabled real mobile devices, massive concurrency for test protocols, testing of web, native, and hybrid apps, enterprise features, as well as videos and screenshots.

Amid the enterprise features, Sauce Labs Real Device Testing supplies a secure tunnel for pre-release testing of apps, APIs and back-ends in the cloud test environment. Role-based security and account provisioning is also available with Team Management and single-sign-on applications provided through the client’s infrastructure.

Beta access to the Real Device Cloud is immediately available through registration at Sauce Labs and pricing starts at $449 per device per month.

The DevOps Angle

As business work hard to stay on top of user needs with apps delivered to mobile devices there has been an increased pressure to develop, test, and deploy new features to existing apps in a continuous lifecycle. This collapse of deadlines can create situations where hotfixes for bugs and the development of new functions may occur multiple times a week to several times a day.

In the world of Continuous Integration (CI) automation of deployment to test environments and automation of that testing that connects the development and operations teams has become a necessity.

Furthermore, simulation and emulation of Android and IOS operation systems that run on these devices can fall slightly short of the behavior of those platforms when running on an actual device. The specific behavior of software is affected by the hardware it runs on—slightly low voltage to a specific mobile CPU, a sensor that works slightly differently than the specs indicate, a random number generator that is seeded differently than documented. The experience of the end user is never as sanitary or precise as an emulation, and while emulators get as close as they can they are not actual devices.

Running a final line of testing on actual devices to see if anything changes or if any unknown glitches or behaviors arises is the last possible effort that can be made before deploying to the actual thing. It’s one further stage in avoiding having the end user affected by a problem that only arises because of hardware.

By providing the larger pool of real devices to companies delivering software, Sauce Labs’s Real Device Cloud allows for quicker results when needed and provides actionable data for development and operations teams.

Featured image credit: Photo via Geralt