In 2021, the world saw a whopping 1.43 billion mobile device units sold worldwide. This has been a positive growth trend year on year, except for a small hiccup in 2020. It shows that people love this pocket-friendly device that lets you accomplish many of the tasks for which you would have needed a big desktop just a couple of decades ago. Also, if the end-user is so engaged on their mobile phone (touching it 2617 times per day on average), developing a mobile application is the best bet businesses can put for their future. As a result, Google Play today hosts 2.65 million mobile applications on their platform for Android users.
Let’s now focus on your mobile application, which will add to this list of 2.65 million when launched for the users. When so many applications are readily available to the end user and just a couple of clicks away, can you afford any mistakes? To bring out the best in our mobile application and deliver a top-quality product, we make it pass through a variety of phases in testing. For example, we’ll check the load with load testing and performance metrics with performance testing, etc. But should we always try to perform the android device testing? Would that be cost and time efficient? If not, then what are our options? Can emulator testing or simulators for mobile testing help? Let’s find out by exploring their work and what they bring to the table.
What is a simulator?
The word “simulator” comes from the core word “simulation,” which roughly means “to imitate a process.” When we run or build a simulator, we imitate another process originally run on a different device, operating system, or machine. Simulators have long been in our life. Starting with a brief print in Alan Turing’s universal machine simulation to flight simulators to train a pilot. Today, in 2022, simulators are almost everywhere, even in transport offices, to simulate a road experience to check the driver’s capabilities.As you can see, you can interact with the simulator and feel like you are interacting with a android device testing. Simulators for mobile testing are a primary goal for testers to point out bugs without actually buying a new phone. This is cost-effective, and you don’t need to worry about buying new phones when they are released (which today happens extremely frequently). Hence, simulators can help you conclude mobile testing faster.
What is a real device?
The above two devices are called virtual devices because they are not tangible in nature. On the other hand, the device that is tangible is referred to as android device testing and development field. A real device is not a specially crafted device for testing or development. It is the same device that you, I, and any other end-user use personally. So you just need to buy a device, install your application and start testing right away. A real device is the best way to test your application because since it is an actual device, all the parameters you would see will be accurate. So, why did we talk about emulators and simulators when a real device looks like the best option? Let’s see the issues in the next section.
