Testing applications for Android
How many devices are needed to test the game for Android, – the authors of the blog Tesgish asked themselves, and turned to the developers of mobile programs with it. The answers of some of them may well scare even a seasoned tester.
400 devices are used to test each of their products at Animoca, a Hong Kong company specializing in girly games for Android. I repeat, they test every game on four hundred gadgets.
The company’s executive director Yat Siu explains that this is necessary for those who focus on the Chinese market, where budget Android smartphones from local manufacturers are very popular, producing more and more similar devices every month.
The authors of Life is Crime from Red Robot (the total number of downloads of all programs is 3.5 million) use only 12 devices for testing, and also resort to the help of outsourced Testology, which helps to “cover” another 35 gadgets.
“I’m guided by common sense,” says Pete Hawley, one of the founders of Red Robot, who worked at EA for 15 years. Relying on the 80/20 rule (80% of the market for 20% of players), he chooses for testing those budget solutions that, in his opinion, most users will have or have.
To analyze the market, Red Robot uses basic information from Google: which versions of Android are most common on the market, which screens devices have. Then they look at which smartphones and tablets users log into their games from. In choosing future testing devices, Red Robot also relies on user requests.
According to Holi, it is important to be selective in which devices need to be supported, given the huge number of budget smartphones from Asia.
“It is important to say no to users with small, cheap devices whose firmware has not been updated for a long time,” Holi clarifies. – “Covering 80% of the market is not so difficult.”
Below is a graph where you can see which devices the company focused on last fall.
Pocket Gems uses approximately the same number of devices for testing (the total number of downloads is 70 million, the authors of games such as Tap Paradise Cove and Tappily Ever After). By the way, they break the testing of each game into three phases:
1. Testing new features
2. Testing the assembled version
3. Final testing
“As soon as all bugs are caught during testing of the assembled version, new content is no longer poured into the game, the code is no longer touched,” says the head of the company Ray Vizzone. The game begins to be polished, to check how it behaves on different devices with different amounts of RAM, different processors, how productive and so on. This is the final testing, after which, in the absence of critical bugs, they are sent to free float.
