During the early years of technology, end users could access all forms of application from only the desktop platform. Desktop is a static platform that highly restricts the working capabilities of creators and developers. So, with the advancement of technology, several other alternatives started to arrive in the market. The most significant arrival was the rise of smartphones in the year 2010.
Smartphones challenged the domination of the desktop market as they could provide a desktop-like performance while fitting in the end users’ pockets. Soon the application development companies began to realize the potential of the smartphone industry. Therefore, this gave rise to the mobile app development markets, which in turn popularized the testing of mobile apps.
An Android emulator is a common name for every tester who’s accustomed to mobile apps. In this article will discuss everything you need to know about Android emulators and how they benefit the application development process. We will also discuss some of the best practices that can help developers to optimize the performance of android emulators while performing cloud testing.
Basics of Android Emulators
Android emulators are a component of the modern mobile app development market. These are highly essential when developers do not have access to native android devices. Using Android Emulators, developers can simulate an android environment on any system. This means android emulators are not only accessible on the Windows platform but also the Macs, iPhones, iPads, and even Linux.
Android emulators also help developers to create multiple instances of an android device at the same time. This process allows developers to speed up the verification phase and ensure you maintain the deadline. Android emulators can also generate random data sets to check the app’s capabilities to handle user interaction. These are some of the most critical factors to ensure that the application is ready for the real world.
Diversity of the Mobile Market
Some experts argue that the smartphone industry is currently the most diverse market. This is because only in the android platform do more than a thousand devices appear annually. We can easily imagine how significant the final number can be, considering that other popular platforms like iOS, Windows, and Linux exist. These devices are entirely different in terms of the operating system, device hardware, screen size, and other specifications.
So, developers can’t generalize the application testing process. In these circumstances, a generalized app testing process can ultimately hamper the final results. There can be fatal errors that can harm the application’s performance and crash it in a worst-case scenario.
Moreover, releasing the final application after verifying its performance on only emulators and simulators is not recommended. This is because multiple emulators and simulators fail to replicate various physical features of an application. Some of the most common examples to justify this claim are the loss in performance due to low battery, low bandwidth, broken display, and user interaction errors.
In such scenarios, the best solution is to use cloud platforms, which can create a balance between these obstacles. Recent statistics show that more than 62% of the mobile market is dominated by Android devices, followed by an iOS device share of 32%. This data is enough to justify the importance of Android testing while releasing a mobile app.
Although we discussed that the test reports of emulators are less efficient than real devices, there are certain areas where emulator testing is recommended. For instance, developers must dump a lot of raw data into the application to check its stress analysis capability. Emulators also help the developers to randomly create different Android environments to check how the visual aesthetics of the application hold to changing screen size.
Benefits of Android Emulators
Now that we have understood the diversity of the device industry and also the basics of Android emulators, it is time to know how Android emulators can help this diverse industry:
- Even without a real device, Android emulators help developers access almost all the apps in the Google Play store. So, checking the application’s performance when integrated with all the other options available is essential.
- Android emulators help developers simulate native features like single tap, double tap, left swipe, right swipe, and many others. These are important to understand how your application reacts to different forms of user interaction.
- Using Android emulators, the developers can simulate multiple Android devices simultaneously and on the same screen. This feature is not even possible while using real Android devices.
- Android emulators eliminate the hassle of worrying about battery life. With Android emulators, the developers can continue the testing process for extended periods.
- Multitasking is highly effective with Android emulators as the capabilities of a desktop processor are more significant than that of a mobile counterpart.
- Android emulators do not offer interruptions that are common while using native devices. For instance, the developers will not have to worry about incoming calls and messages while using Android emulators for application testing.
Basics of Cloud Testing
As discussed earlier in this article, cloud testing helps developers to eliminate the hassle of maintaining a physical device testing bench while also improving the accuracy that is not present with emulators and simulators. This is because cloud platforms store hundreds of real devices on multiple servers. The developers can access these servers and execute the test cases from anywhere worldwide. The developers only have to pay a minimum license fee to perform all the steps.
Cloud platforms also allow the developers to test the functioning of the application on multiple legacy browsers that are no longer available in the market. It is an essential process, as a recent study shows that a huge portion of the audience base does not update their devices before three years. So, app developers also need to ensure stable performance on older devices. Moreover, the developers can update the devices manually while using cloud testing.
Integration of Android Emulators with Cloud Platforms
Various cloud platforms work seamlessly with Android emulators. Using these platforms, the developers can not only improve the efficiency of the test cases but also introduce certain new features for improving the quality of the final application. We can improve our understanding of this concept with the help of LambdaTest as a central point:
We can begin our discussion by defining LambdaTest as a secure cloud grid to verify the cross-browser compatibility of a modern web application. Cross-browser compatibility has currently become the industry standard for ensuring that the application is accessible to all of your users. Using cross-browser compatibility test cases, the developers can ensure that they provide the best performance irrespective of changes in the browser version and operating system.
LambdaTest offers various features like parallel test execution to improve the efficiency of the test cases by more than ten times. Parallel test execution is the process of initiating multiple test configurations at the same time. Also gives the option to verify cross-browser compatibility of locally hosted web pages. Developers can also execute automation test cases from various popular automation testing tools/frameworks like Selenium, Playwright, and Cypress. It also generates highly accurate test results by combining hundreds of reports from simulators, emulators, and even real devices.
While we’re on the topic of integrating cloud platforms with Android emulators, it is worth noting that the developers must verify the trustworthiness of the tool before they start executing the tests on it. This is because an inefficient platform will fail to improve the testing process and slow it down in adverse cases. The most common way to perform this process is to visit multiple online forums and check the ratings of tech users.
Developers can also introduce automation testing to improve the efficiency of Android emulators on a cloud platform. This is because automation testing can perform all the repetitive test cases and eliminate the hassle for human developers. Developers, in turn, can use this extra time to create interactive features that can be added in a future update.
Automation testing conducts all the test cases from predetermined data present in the text file. However, developers can also change this data according to the project requirements. It is worth noting that the initial expenses of introducing automation testing are pretty high. So, the developers must adequately plan their business ventures before making this transition.
The use of automation technology also helps the developers to initiate continuous development and continuous testing on cloud Android emulators. These are two of the most famous agile methodologies for increasing collaboration between the testing and development teams. The improved collaboration between testing and development teams can help notably improve the application’s quality and massively reduce the knowledge gap. This is because, with this process, the testing of the app is performed during the active development stage.
Conclusion
We can easily conclude that Android emulators are critical to the modern mobile app testing industry. This is because if the developers fail to make their application available on the mobile platform, they would be sacrificing a huge portion of the audience base. Experts believe that mobile users consume more than 55% of the current Internet market.
There are three types of mobile applications, namely native applications, hybrid applications, and cross-platform applications. We would recommend that app developers focus on cross-platform apps as it saves the hassle of individually creating the app for every platform. Moreover, cross-platform apps are highly advanced and provide several beneficial features for modern users.
Lastly, app developers need to realize the importance of a cloud platform in the development process.
