Would you be interested by a SAAS specialized on mobile dev/testing?
After 5+ years as a SDET(*) I built numerous tools, frameworks and proprietary services to help teams to test their products, collect metrics, reduce their TTM, and diagnose bugs in production. I had the chance to work with mobile developers and testers remotely and on site.
My observation is always the same. There is a lack of affordable solutions specialized in mobile development / testing.
I plan to build a SAAS that will help devs / testers / small teams to get mobiles on demand and dev/testing tools. I will start with emulators and simulators that you can provision and use on-demand remotely. Everything will be possible with a desktop app.
Note : real devices are not planned for the MVP, but will be part of the solution later, as it introduces a bigger level of complexity.
Some of the key features
- review and reporting tools (screenshots, videos, ...)
- mobile app management (store/catalog)
- comparison tool : modular interface for comparing executions on multiple devices in real time
- Collaborative tools : screenshare, review, ...
- easy device configuration
- no resource consumption : we provide the infrastructure
Of course you have popular solutions on the market but they are not really specialized for mobile development and testing, and are not really affordable for solo dev / small companies (you pay for features you don't necessarily need).
Interested ?
I'm asking to mobile developers and testers that I personally know, but also to you the IH community 😊.
Please answer to the poll 🙏 and if you have time, I would highly appreciate that you share your thoughts, what you would love to see (or not) in this SAAS or ask any question you have in mind.
Thanks !
(*) Software Development Engineer in Test
I suppose it comes down to what you mean by "affordable". Browserstack has unlimited automated testing on real devices starting at $200 a month (and manual device testing starting at $25). I agree that as a solo dev with no MRR, it's too high. But at a few thousand dollars in revenue, it's not that bad of a cost.
I am perhaps a bit different dev these days from the mainstream community so others probably have different needs. What I would see myself using is something that hooks into my automated test suite (cypress, capybara, etc). If it was easy to set up enough that I could simply add it in as another browser type and somehow make it work without any real extra configuration. It would have to integrate well into a CI/CD pipeline as well ideally. If I could get something like that and it ends in the $10-50/mo range it would be probably a tool I'd reach for.
Hi @cpetr and thank you for taking the time to answer!
By affordable I mean something between 20-50$/mo. The core value proposition will be very focused on managing a fleet of devices, switching between them easily, and run them in parallel (for different dev/testing strategies).
So yes the idea is to bring an easy way to connect the devices to existing solutions by providing connectors / interfaces to existing testing frameworks like Appium, or even dev tools like adb.
I'm glad to know it's a tool that you would probably use. Thank you for providing your feedback! I will keep a list of people interested by the service so I can reach them later and provide free credits as a thank you. I'm not collecting the emails, but for sure I will come back to this thread when it's time!
Do not hesitate to upvote the post so I have a chance to give it some visibility. Seems particularly hard in this "developers" section, there are a lot of posts :) !