First in market with a global reach, cooperation with leading OEMs and 1.5M+ Android activations per day provide proof-points for Testdroid’s success among mobile ecosystem

Sandboxes. We’ve all sat in them, built castles in them, wrestled toys away from other children in them. The definition of a sandbox is quite simple: a box filled with sand where children play.

Next week, May 15-17, we’ll be in the most recognized sandbox in the technology playground, the Google I/O Developer Conference Sandbox, and we are fired up to be part of this elite group! The Developer Sandbox showcases demos from a wide range of developers who have built applications based on products and technologies that are being featured at Google I/O. This includes us. We’ll be rubbing elbows and exchanging ideas with talented minds as we introduce Google+ sign in to all Testdroid products. Earlier this year, Google launched its Google+ sign in as a standard way to log in to online services. We support Google’s initiatives in whatever they do, even more so when developers are at the heart of these initiatives. Move over Facebook, now you can sign in with Google +!

This will be the second year that we’ve showcased Testdroid at Google I/O. Last year at this time, while some developers showed limited, web-based app testing capabilities in iOS, we were the only ones there that demonstrated the power of cloud-based app testing. This year we expect to see many more like-minded developers, even though we remain first-to-market with a global reach. We view our second year participating at Google I/O as a milestone that not only marks our growth over these past 12 months – confirming that we are on the right path and doing some cool stuff – but is testimony to the evolution of the Android testing platform industry as a whole … like more children playing in the sandbox.

We look forward to our three days in San Francisco next week at Google I/O and are excited to be in the Sandbox. Oh, and we promise to play nice!

Hi All,

Since the last Testdroid Recorder release three weeks ago, we’re proud to introduce you the new version of Testdroid Recorder. In this version the main goal was to improve recording and playback experience according to WebView (what entail web page recording as well). Now it’s faster and more accurate. We also improved issues in reporting system and fixed a few bugs. So, the main items that were improved in Testdroid Recorder 4.1 are as follows:

Better recording and playback with WebView

For the version 4.0, we refactored completely the core of Recorder, but skipped the WebView and moved all of that work to version 4.1. Now we’re happy to say that it is much faster, accurate and able to catch many more elements. Improving the accuracy entailed also another important fact – now we are also able to record web pages which uses sencha touch. We also did some improvements on playback side and managed to improve the playback performance in order to provide a smoother experience to users. Also, there are more events sent through JavaScript so that test script can more easily simulate real clicks and text typing into HTML elements on page.

Improved reporting system

We did a lot of changes to our issues reporting system. Firstly, we made it more stable as sometimes some customers have had issues to send us their reports. Secondly, the logic of sending reports was enhanced with the instant reporting capability from every wizard – not only from Recording wizard – and for this, we added a field with custom message to describe the issue. This provides users more information about the issue as the Eclipse log file isn’t necessarily describe the issue in decent level (e.g. issue may not have anything to do with Exception occured in Eclipse but something else). And finally, we added a field with a custom email so the user doesn’t have to be logged in to our public cloud. And for users who have the private servers can send us those reports as well as users who are not logged in to Recorder.

Fixed issues / Enhancements

• Automatic updates after clicking “Update” from the Info dialog
• If more than one device is connected, the recording preparation is done only on single chosen device (not on all)
• Wrong coordinations calculation when Activity go to landscape mode for x,y clicks
• Enhanced and made sending reports stable
• Weird UI behaving when switching between Testdroid and Report Problem page in Preferences
• Recorder opens TestdroidRecorderCore automatically if it is closed

Updating your Testdroid Recorder

You can update to the new version directly from Eclipse (About Eclipse -> Installation Details, selecting Testdroid Recorder and clicking Update)

Howdy all you mobile testers out there!

During the past months, we’ve seen how Testdroid has become the profound development and testing platform for mobile enthusiasts, serious companies building their next-big-things on mobile, and a bunch of others. Already by today, Testdroid Cloud has proven its real value in creation of the most solid and robust apps and games across Android device variants, and in fact, many of those are used by millions and millions of end-users. Every day. That’s a stunning achievement, and for sure keeps us pushing the innovation envelope to deliver you only the best tools and methods to make your apps super-robust for next app generations to come.

We’ve experienced how profoundly Testdroid Cloud changes otherwise so tedious testing effort to easy, instant result-driven testing with improved workflow and sophisticated monitoring capabilities. As the traditional way of testing mobile applications on real devices has been time-consuming, error prone, expensive, and rarely covering an adequate set of devices used by the mobile ecosystem, we’ve found the right angle to tackle these challenges and help developers to cover their testing on 95% of the most used devices. That’s a significant market coverage, and just in minutes.

One great thing in Testdroid Cloud is the App Crawler. If you are familiar with the concept of Web crawling, the App Crawler does pretty much the same thing for mobile application that Web crawling does for World Wide Web. In a nutshell, the App Crawler is an intelligent application crawler that executes application systematically by traversing through each of the views in the Android view hierarchy, taking screenshots, and recording performance data as the crawler progresses through each view.

In Android applications activity is an application component that provides a screen with which users can interact in order to do something, such as dial the phone, take a photo, send an email, or view a map. Each activity is given a window in which to draw its user interface with the help of setContentView(View). Testdroid Activity Lens is agreat tool for visualizing the state changes from one activity to another during the App Crawling and user can investigate transitions between these activities after each crawl device by device. These state transitions are all part of the application activity lifecycle and how your app does these transitions has significant impact on the end user experience.

An application usually consists of multiple activities that are loosely bound to each other. In the example video, the activities were MovieTabWidget, Movies and MovieTrailer. Typically, one activity in an application is specified as the “main” activity (MovieTabWidget, in the video example), which is presented to the user when launching the application for the first time. Each activity can then start another activity in order to perform different actions. Each time a new activity starts, the previous activity is stopped, but the system preserves the activity in a stack. When a new activity starts, it is pushed onto the back stack and takes user focus. The back stack abides to the basic “last in, first out” stack mechanism, so, when the user is done with the current activity and presses the Back button, it is popped from the stack (and destroyed) and the previous activity resumes.

While activities are often presented to the user as full-screen windows, they can also be used in other ways: as floating windows (via a theme with the set of windowIsFloating) or embedded inside of another activity (using ActivityGroup). You declare your activities in the manifest file in order for it to be accessible to the system. To declare your activity, open your manifest file and add an <activity> element as a child of the <application> element. For example:

<manifest ...>
    <application ... >
        <activity android:name=".MovieTabWidget" />
        <activity android:name=".Movies" />
        <activity android:name=".MovieTrailer" />
        ...
    </application ... >
    ...
</manifest ...>


Please take a moment to try out the new App Crawler feature at cloud.testdroid.com. It would be awesome to hear your thoughts on this new feature, and basically anything related to Testdroid. Just drop me an email at ville-veikko [dot] helppi [at] bitbar [dot] com.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts!

We have great news to all Testdroid users out there: Testdroid Recorder 4.0 is out and it is better than ever!

As you may have noticed it took us 2 months (instead of our normal 2 weeks) to develop this version and there is a really good reason for it as we did a total overhaul to the recorder core to improve performance during recording (which was sometimes really slow) but as a byproduct of this fundamental change in the recording logic came several other significant improvements as well.

We had been looking for ways to improve performance during recording for a long time because, especially on applications with a lot of UI widgets, our current approach slowed down the recording to the point that started creating frustration among our users. About 2 months ago we came up with a totally new way to implement the recording logic and part of our Recorder team started to work separately on prototyping (to prove that the idea might work) and, after really successful prototype, started reimplementing the core recording logic from scratch. A total revamp was needed because a significant improvement in performance was based on completely new approach in recording logic and redesign core architecture. After 2 months of hard work we are able to present the best Testdroid Recorder ever, which is now about five times faster!

Changing architecture and reimplementing core recording logic improved also UI widget recognition. Now if there are no id or text on a widget we recognize it by index(applies to all clickable views) – so there will be no more x,y clicks for any clickable UI widgets. Now Recorder is also able to obtain r.id’s for UI widgets even if the apk that is used for recording is obfuscated which is also a big improvement in recording accuracy as more and more applications use proGuard and using r.id’s is the best way to create robust and scalable test scripts.

To improve the readability of the generated Java code we decided to add a bunch of simple methods to our extSolo library that enable us to generate much more concise and readable test scripts. For instance we recorded commands like waitForButton, waitForImage, but  in generated code there was waitForView with complex arguments to obtain each widget. Now the generated source code looks more like one-to-one copy of the steps in recording window.

You can update to the new version directly from Eclipse (About Eclipse -> Installation Details, selecting Testdroid Recorder and clicking Update)