Traditional device labs have long been a cornerstone of mobile app testing but come with significant challenges. Setting up and maintaining a physical device lab requires substantial investment in hardware, ongoing maintenance, and infrastructure.
As new devices and OS versions are released, keeping the lab updated becomes costly and time-consuming. Scalability is another major hurdle, as acquiring and managing a diverse range of devices for global testing can quickly become impractical.
Enter the cloud mobile phone, a game-changing solution that eliminates the need for expensive hardware while providing on-demand access to real devices via the cloud. These cloud-based platforms instantly enable testers to run manual and automated tests across multiple devices, improving efficiency and reducing costs.
By leveraging cloud mobile phones, businesses can achieve greater flexibility, enhance test coverage, and accelerate release cycles, making them an ideal alternative to traditional device labs.
The Problem with Traditional Device Labs
The production and maintenance of a traditional device lab are expensive and resource-intensive. Companies should invest heavily in purchasing various smartphones and tablets and secure coverage in many manufacturers, OS versions, and network situations.
However, these devices quickly become outdated due to consistent improvements and high depreciation prices. Beyond hardware, retaining a totally useful lab requires devoted infrastructure, physical space, and ongoing IT aid, further driving up charges. Scalability is another main roadblock—increasing take a look at insurance methods acquiring extra devices, which is not viable for growing groups or global testing needs.
In addition, the test teams are disabled, struggling with access to external or unique geographical regions, and cooperation is disabled. These limitations make traditional unit laboratories an unstable alternative for fast-paced mobile development, highlighting the need for a smoother and cost-effective alternative.
What Are Cloud Mobile Phones?
Cloud mobile phones are real, physical smartphones hosted on remote servers and accessible via the cloud. Unlike emulators or simulators, these devices provide a true-to-life testing environment, allowing developers and QA teams to interact as they would with a locally available phone.
Through cloud-based platforms, testers can install apps, perform manual or automated tests, and test performance factors such as battery consumption, networking and hardware compatibility without the need for real equipment. This access on request eliminates the boundaries of the traditional unit laboratory, enabling a spontaneous test in a wide range of marks, models and OS versions.
With cloud mobile phones, businesses can increase test coverage, easily scale, and reduce operating costs, while their applications can be sure to work defect-free in different tools and user situations.
Why Is Real Device Cloud Testing A Better Option?
Real device cloud is a mobile testing environment that allows users to access real devices to test their apps on a wide range of Android and iOS devices directly from the desktop browser. Real device cloud testing allows you to test your native apps for functionality, compatibility and reliability.
Why should you go for real device cloud testing when you can build your device lab? If you can buy devices and you can hire people to build the device lab, you should. The foremost concern in implementing this is the cost factor and it is one of the factors you should consider while choosing to build your device lab. The more device coverage you are willing to achieve (the higher the better), the more it will cost you.
However, we should not jump straight to the conclusion with only this one answer. As time goes on, you may find a number of reasons rising. We have listed a few below.
As a highlight, you can use LambdaTest’s testing cloud to perform manual and automated end-to-end testing at scale.
1. Device Management
A mobile application test matrix can invite 100 to 300 (or 500) unique devices. Acquiring so many devices can incur costs, but much more can be spent on maintenance. Newer devices keep coming into the market, and older ones are phased out. One part of maintaining your device lab is to keep purchasing new ones.
On the other hand, you need to keep each device updated to its latest firmware version, operating system, etc. All this multiplied to 300-500 costs a lot of time and hence a lot of money.
Real device cloud testing can solve your problem as you don’t need to worry about updating devices. The service providers do all the maintenance work. With LambdaTest, you can access over 5000+ real devices instantly. View the list of devices supported by LambdaTest.
Now, with LambdaTest, you can perform real-time live interaction testing of your website or web app from Firefox 63 Beta to the latest Firefox version.
2. Infrastructure Management
Infrastructure management may be seen as the most troublesome thing when maintaining a real device cloud. Once you have devices in your hand, everything else related to your desktop screen to these devices comes under infrastructure. You won’t plug in each device to test the application. You have a connection, a grid (like selenium grids), mobile app testing frameworks attached to this network, a method to pass the automation data so that it propagates through each device, a network that maintains the health of devices and much more.
3. Workforce
All of the above points require a good number of man-hours to keep everything running. Organizations reduce this load by increasing the number of engineers working just on the device lab maintenance and everything related to it. Needless to say, this costs extra money as a part of their salary, which can be avoided if there was no device lab to maintain such as when we opt for real device cloud labs.
4. Scaling
Scaling in mobile app testing through real devices is keeping the latest devices in hand, which are released very frequently today. These devices do not phase out at the same rate as they are released into the market. With real device cloud testing, scaling becomes easier as the new devices are added to the cloud as soon as they are released. This also boosts our compatibility criteria while releasing the application.
5. Software Delivery
The consequence of all the points discussed above comes down to the software delivery time. When we spend so much of our time on non-testing related things, software delivery gets delayed, which affects our credibility and business. Maintaining a real device ourselves poses this challenge, and therefor, it is advisable to go for real device cloud testing as it keeps you aligned to the timelines, especially when agile makes things even more time-related.
Another factor that influences software delivery is when multiple teams are using your device lab. Real device cloud is made for multiple users accessing the devices simultaneously. This does not happen in the personal real device lab. If one team is operating on the device lab (be it the development team for alpha testing or another testing team), you just have to wait for your turn. This can further delay the timelines.
6. Reports
The final point we may consider before deciding to go for a manual real device lab setup or a cloud-based one is the reporting. Reports are much more important than they sound like at the first stage. They don’t tell you what tests you ran, what functions you tested or even what language you used. They tell you the overall analysis of how everything went so that anyone can give it a glance and understand the current situation. But how it is represented makes a lot of difference too.
Practically, your in-house real device lab and real device cloud lab both can provide a good reporting system. There are only two differences here. First is that you have to invest some time in aggregating the results and building a mechanism that is robust and visually appealing. This is a one-time job unless you have the same infrastructure and, in every sense, manageable. The real device cloud will have all this ready for you, and there are a few engineers who are regularly involved in improving these reports. This is challenging in the in-house setup as real device cloud reports will regularly improve.
Why Choose LambdaTest?
LambdaTest is a cross-browser testing platform that allows you to test web and mobile apps using the cloud. It enables app testers to perform cross-browser testing, mobile app testing, and responsiveness tests on different browsers and mobile devices.
LambdaTest’s mobile device testing feature allows you to perform both manual and automated device testing of your native apps.
Here’s a short glimpse of LambdaTest mobile app testing features:
- Test your websites and native applications on a wide range of iOS and Android devices.
- Perform responsiveness test, and compatibility test on any device from their real device cloud.
- Completely eliminate the need for an on-premise device lab.
- Test instantly on real devices using our real device testing cloud with zero setup or maintenance charges.
- Run high volumes of tests on real devices and reduce defect rate.
- Integrate directly with popular CI/CD tools.
- Identify and debug apps in real-time using device logs, network logs, app logs, screenshots and videos. Identify UI anomaly using inspect element.
- Upload your .apk, .aab or .ipa files to test new apps or install production apps by downloading them directly from the App Store or Play Store.
- Test native device features such as camera, touch screen, gestures, etc., using a real device cloud as if the mobile were in your hand.
- Reduce false positives while running automation and ship with confidence.
- Configure your automation framework tests easily by using our real device capabilities generator.
Just as a highlight, you can use LambdaTest’s testing cloud to perform manual and automated end-to-end testing at scale.
Wrapping Up
Cloud mobile phones have emerged as the smartest, most cost-effective alternative for traditional device labs, solving the challenges of high costs, maintenance costs, and scalability limits.
These cloud-based solutions enable simple mobile testing without purchasing hardware or maintenance by providing access to real devices on request. Teams can immediately test on many devices, OS versions, and network conditions, ensuring better test coverage, quick release cycles, and app quality.
When mobile ecosystems quickly become complicated, it is no longer convenient to rely on chronic physical laboratories. Now, it is time to embrace Cloud Mobile testing, which will increase efficiency, reduce costs, and prove your mobile test strategy in the future.
Explore leading cloud platforms today and take your testing capabilities to the next level!
