By Lesa 
Can you test your application on all mobile devices? No? This is because there are hundreds of thousands of mobile devices available in the market with thousands more arriving every year. So, instead of relying on traditional testing methods of setting up a physical device lab, you can consider using a cloud mobile phone to meet all these goals.
This approach will also help you get rid of the massive expenses, resources, and time that you have to typically invest in a traditional mobile testing lab. Confused with cloud-based mobile device testing?
Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will explore the major benefits of using this testing process. During our discussion, we will also divert the limelight towards some of the modern approaches that can help you optimize mobile app testing strategies.
What Is A Cloud Mobile Phone
Before we start to dive straight into the benefits of a cloud mobile phone, we must take a step back and understand what is it at the ground level. A cloud-based mobile phone is a device that you can access through a cloud platform or a remote server. With this process, you can access and execute the test cases on these devices from anywhere in the world.
Cloud-based mobile testing will also allow you to access a huge range of outdated devices that are no longer available in the market. Some of the major advantages of this platform include cost efficiency, scalability, real-time collaboration, and enhanced testing coverage.
Why Use Cloud-Based Mobile Testing
Now that we have developed a basic understanding of what is cloud-based mobile testing, let us divert our attention towards some of the major reasons that justify the integration of this process within your testing infrastructure:
1. Cost Efficiency
As we already mentioned earlier, you will have to invest at least a million dollars to set up and maintain an in-house device testing lab. Moreover this is not the end of investment as you will have to continuously purchase all the new devices as they continue to appear in the market.
On the other hand, a cloud based mobile testing platform will eliminate these expenses as you just have to pay a subscription fee for your chosen cloud platform. After this, you can access as many devices as you require, depending on the needs of the testing projects. Moreover, you also do not have to invest additional resources in maintaining the devices as they will be undertaken by the platform themselves.
The pay-as-you-go model that is invested by most of the cloud-based testing platforms, will allow you to pay only for the resources that you are using. This is one of the most important flexibilities that can help individual creators or small startup companies.
2. Scalability and Flexibility
One of the major challenges of implementing mobile device testing is accounting for multiple devices, screen size variations, and operating system changes. However, by using cloud-based mobile testing, you’ll have a scalable structure which will let you add thousands of different devices depending on your target configurations.
With such a huge array of devices, you will also have access to parallel testing. This is the process of initiating multiple test scripts on different devices at the same time. This is a very important parameter as you have to deal with thousands of different test cases in a modern testing scenario. So, the proper implementation of this process will allow you to wrap up the entire testing infrastructure within just a few days.
3. Remote Access and Collaboration
The cloud infrastructure of a remote mobile testing lab allows you to access these devices from anywhere in the world. So, if you are working with a remote and distributed team, this will be one of the major factors that will help you implement smooth collaboration and teamwork within your company.
This means that the developers, testers, and QA engineers can work in real-time, accessing the test scripts instantly and also troubleshooting the issues as soon as they arise within the app infrastructure.
Moreover, while using cloud-based mobile testing platforms, you’ll also have the option of adding project management tools, continuous integration, and continuous deployment pipelines. We suggest you to also add version control systems so that you can have a smooth workflow and also improve the productivity of the entire testing workflow.
4. Increased Test Coverage
If you test your mobile application on only a handful of devices, it can lead to gaps in test coverage, which will lead to missing critical bugs. Since cloud-based platforms have access to thousands of devices, operating systems, and browsers, you can choose all the variations or mobile devices to ensure a comprehensive test coverage.
These platforms also let you access the devices with different network configurations. So, you can use this parameter to understand the fluctuation in the application’s performance when exposed to real-world scenarios. Some of the major conditions that you can test with this process include varying network strengths, bandwidth limitations, and carrier conditions.
The implementation of this process will help you ensure that there is at least one dedicated test case for every element present on the user interface of your application.
5. Enhanced Security and Compliance
Currently developing a modern application? You already know exactly how important it is to ensure proper security and compliance within the infrastructure of the application. So, you must choose a reputable cloud testing platform which implements strict security measures, including encryption, secure access controls, and compliance with industry standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO.
You should also implement role-based access control so that all the team members have access to only that much data that is required as per their role in the testing process. This approach will help remove any security risks that can come while handling sensitive customer information.
We also suggest the testers to perform additional security test cases when working with sensitive applications like ecommerce apps, banking apps, or health apps.
6. Faster Testing and Time-to-Market
If you are still stuck with the traditional mobile testing process, you are investing a lot of time, even months, in the application development cycle. In most cases, this time is mostly consumed by device procurement, setup procedures, and maintenance overhead. If you switch to cloud-based mobile testing, you can massively cut down this time as you will instantly access real devices for initiating the test cases.
Additionally, features like parallel testing, automated testing, and integration with DevOps workflows will also speed up the entire testing procedure. And it is not unknown to anyone that faster testing means quicker release of high-quality applications. Factors like these are very important to continue maintaining a positive brand reputation in this market.
7. Support for Automated Testing
Working with complex mobile applications? Yes? You must have then realized that it is impossible to wrap up all the test cases by only relying on manual testing. You can use cloud-based mobile device testing platforms to automate the test cases using platforms like Appium, Espresso, and Selenium. Automation testing eliminates the possibilities of human errors or redundant testing scenarios.
This process will also help the testing teams to execute large test suites in parallel configuration automatically. With the help of automation testing, you will not only improve the efficiency of the testing infrastructure but also gain faster feedback to improve the application performance.
In the context of automation testing, we would like to caution the testers about how important it is, to understand those areas of the application that cannot be automated. For example, exploratory testing requires the involvement of human testers. So, to ensure the perfect testing scenario, it is very important to maintain the balance between automation testing and manual testing.
8. Real-Device Testing vs. Emulators and Simulators
Many testers believe that emulators and simulators provide nearly similar test results compared to real device testing. However, it is very important to understand that with this simulation software, you cannot understand how the performance of the application changes when exposed to various physical parameters like human interaction errors, broken displays, or a low battery error.
The solution? With cloud-based testing platforms, you can access real devices that can exactly mimic how the application will perform when your users will be accessing it on their personal devices. You can also understand the behavior of the application under various hardware conditions like CPU usage, battery consumption, and thermal performance.
Factors like these are very important to guarantee that the smooth and optimal performance of your application will not be limited by any hardware or software capabilities of current mobile devices.
LambdaTest
Now that we have understood all the major benefits of investing in a cloud-based mobile testing platform, let us understand how these benefits influence the working of a real cloud-based testing platform. To shed more light over this segment, we have chosen the example of LambdaTest for our reference.
LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browsers and OS combinations and 5000+ real devices. LambdaTest allows you to combine automation testing platforms like Selenium with mobile testing platforms like Appium to implement automated cloud-based mobile cross-browser testing. The following code snippet will help you understand how you can initiate this process with LambdaTest:
You can also use this cloud testing platform to generate comprehensive test reports after the test execution process. You can also keep track of the bugs natively and also track the progress of the application testing process in real-time.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the factors that we put forward in this article, we can easily say that cloud-based mobile device testing is changing the way how you test your mobile apps. With all the benefits that we have mentioned in this article, you can easily say that they have a massive advantage when compared with traditional testing practices.
By using a cloud mobile phone, you can not only improve the application quality but also reduce the testing overhead while accelerating the development cycle. Moreover, as mobile applications and the devices themselves continue to evolve, it will become even more important to adopt these practices within your testing environment.
Is your organization struggling to optimize the mobile app testing processes? Invest in cloud-based mobile device testing so that you give the highest level of efficiency, accuracy, and competitive advantage in the market.