With India’s mobile application testing market being estimated at around $60 million, there is definitely hope that the future holds brighter and more competitive days for developers and testers alike. In the midst of a seemingly rapid-growing industry is this new venture called pCloudy, the nation’s first cloud based mobile app testing services provider, formed under the aegis of Smart Software Testing Solutions, founded in 2015. A recent round-table gathering shed some light on their flagship offering, and how they just might disrupt the market.
It is a known fact that the world is converging on mobile; from advertising to app development, to technology enhancement, virtually everything revolves around mobiles and handheld devices. As per CMO Council estimates, India alone had an estimated 853 million mobile subscriptions by 2014! To share some interesting facts about the mobile app testing market, specifically, Avinash Tiwari, the IIT-BHU educated Co-Founder and Director of pCloudy, shed some light on it:
– There are some 10 different Android versions in the market today, operating across a variety of devices
– 19,000 distinct Android devices available in the market
– There is a worldwide $4 billion application download market to be catered to
– India already has a market potential $60 million for mobile application testing
– The estimated worldwide revenue for mobile application testing, is said to hover around $800 million, by end 2017, according to ABI research.
Question is, why is mobile application testing getting such attention? Well, apart from the fact that that the technology world is now centering around mobile devices, the demand for providing perfectly functional apps, with the right targeted devices and that too at feasible costs and break-neck timelines, remains the primary challenge in the industry. That is exactly where pCloudy steps in to the aid of developers as it provides real time access of mobile devices, which signed users can access over the internet via a browser. The entire setup consists of 3 main parts:
– The software setup, which allows for the real-time streaming of a device and any action performed on it through the browser is sent to the device in real time. There is also the addition of many tool sets which can be useful for debugging and data generation like direct access of crash logs, video filing, etc.
– There is a host of customized hardware which runs the softwares. It includes hardware devices that supply accurate charging power to various devices, which also could help developers differentiate on the basis of the efficiency of the apps.
– The entire physical device set up are real devices running on Android and iOS.
This idea obviously needs an assessment of how this translates into benefits for the developers, or developing enterprises for apps. For starters, there is a 30 per cent increment in productivity, 44 per cent reduction in test cycles and a 25 per cent increment in test coverage. Add to that a host of localized devices, as available in the APAC region, a full range of setup offerings like private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise cloud, and the obvious cost effectiveness of such a setup, which takes away the major chunk of app development and release cost. If this still does not sound interesting enough, there are technical advantages that pCloud has:
a) Single click certification engine – Users can upload their apps and get a comprehensive
test result without any human intervention.
b) Network simulation capability – Users can test their Apps in a variety of network conditions.
c) Support for most number of Automated tools both in Unit test and Functional test
category.
d) Truly Parallel Automation run of multiple devices.
With the current market worth of $60 million for mobile testing, pCloudy is offering something rather new in the market as they are the only enterprise doing so in India since a few years. This is the case with majority of the APAC region, which includes other markets like Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia where pCloudy is looking to step in a bigger way. With their presence in the United States and Philippines, the market capturing capability seems to be immense as they indicate a strong trend of growth. India is obviously the home ground, as small and big developers are being pushed to release their apps on the market at a faster rate and doing so in just the nominal costs helps create a feasible turnover as competition rises by the day. To sum it up; pCloudy will ensure that applications are tested in real time (users need to pay and book slots on the server), gives detailed reports of the existing bugs and helps you improve upon them, monitors progress and functionality of the apps, and eventually helps you to release at perhaps a fraction of the cost.