OEMs seeing value in Bitbar's Testdroid to reach developers

    App developing and automation are interests of ours, so it’s been too long since we’ve gotten an article about Bitbar, the Finnish creator of the Testdroid services for testing how exactly your app runs android devices.

    The rise of Testdroid is the story of the gift and the curse of Android’s open platform. While Android has a huge market share, you can’t always be sure your UI will work on every Android device known to man due to differences in hardware and software, making testing a required part of building a polished app. So with some special software and a bunch of devices, Bitbar’s flagship product, Testdroid Cloud, allows you to do remote tests on actual devices to see how they hold up to your app.

    Since launching Testdroid in 2012 the company saw over 17.7 million test runs in the second quarter of 2014 on their 288 supported devices. Among those doing the testing are companies like Google, Cisco, Supercell, and Facebook as public customers.

    Device manufacturers are also seeing the value in Testdroid as a tool to boost the usability of their devices. Starting last week in collaboration with Intel, it became free for users to use Testdroid Cloud to run tests on Intel Atom-based tablets, such as the Acer Iconia Tab 8, Asus Fonepad, Dell Venue, and Samsung Galaxy Tab to name a few.

    With all of those 17.7 million tests the company was able to come up with some key findings they published in the first half of the year including some straightforward facts, like the more ram a device has, the better it’s likely to preform. The same isn’t true for the number of processors; quad-core processors are buggier than dual core. Those of you developing for Android may be able to get even more from their results.

    Recently the company has popped a new front-end into their platform, allowing them to scale the UI and these components to different use cases as compared to their “Classic” UI, as well as integrating better into some standard industry tools.

    A new product feature coming out, called Testdroid Interactive, will provide an instant, remote manual access to any of Intel Atom-based device and users can take an interactive remote access and debugging sessions to these devices by using a web browser.