To satisfy the highly rising expectations of the customers companies are focusing on utilizing innovative technologies to create mobile applications. However, ensuring that these applications work accurately while being compatible with various hardware and operating systems is daunting.
Physical device testing may simulate a more accurate real-world scenario, but businesses often struggle with testing on multiple devices. This strengthens the need for virtual devices, also known as emulators or simulators.
Simulators are computer programs that simulate real device behavior to allow testers to test their mobile applications within a virtual format. Consequently, they have now become an integral component of the testing platforms.
Using the capability of these mobile testing platforms, you can test any mobile application without having any real devices, multiple operating systems, and network configurations. This can help businesses dramatically save testing time and expenses while guaranteeing that their mobile apps are high-quality and functioning by utilizing a mobile test platform that supports virtual devices.
But before we dive deeper into the world of virtual devices to see how we can use them for testing. Let’s first learn about them.
What are Virtual Devices?
Virtual devices sometimes referred to as emulators or simulators, are computer programs that mimic the behavior of smartphones or tablets. Therefore, this will allow you to test your mobile applications without the need for physical devices. Developers and testers can test their mobile applications in various simulated scenarios by customizing virtual devices on multiple mobile app testing tools online to emulate multiple operating systems, screen sizes, resolutions, and network circumstances.
You can make the Mobile application testing process easier using the virtual devices, particularly in the early phases of development. These provide affordable alternatives to organizations to enable them to test their software on different hardware and operating systems without buying the devices.
Different types of Virtual Device
Emulators and simulators are the two types of virtual devices frequently used for testing mobile applications. Both have advantages and disadvantages, such as Emulators are slow but accurate while simulators are faster but may not accurately represent real-world usage.
Emulators
Emulators are essential components of any mobile test platform. This virtual device can duplicate the processor, memory, and storage of physical devices like tablets and smartphones, as well as the hardware and software environment. Plus, can give an accurate representation of the behavior of the device to the testers.
You can use emulators to test mobile apps that require low-level access to hardware elements like the camera, GPS, or accelerometer. This is because emulators enable testers to assess the functioning of the application under various usage scenarios. Simulating several hardware components ensures the application operates as intended in real-world circumstances.
Simulators
Unlike emulators, simulators do not replicate the hardware component but repeat the operating system. They are useful for testing basic functionalities like navigation, user interface, and user experience. Simulators are also a crucial component of mobile app testing tools online because they don’t need low-level access to the device hardware and are often faster than emulators. Since simulators may not accurately reflect real-world scenarios, thus it’s advised to combine them with additional testing techniques, such as physical device testing or emulation testing, to provide rigorous testing of mobile applications.
How to use a virtual device for Testing Mobile application
Follow these steps to test your mobile application using a virtual device.
Step I: Installing an Emulator
Android Studio’s built-in emulator, Genymotion, and Xamarin are popular solutions for testing mobile applications. Emulators have the functionality to simulate multiple configurations that will assist developers in testing their applications across various platforms without having a physical device. The most common emulator for the iOS mobile test platform is Xcode. It is the official Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Apple. Plus, it gives flexibility to the developers for testing their applications on various iOS devices including their different screen sizes, operating system versions, and device orientations.
Step II: Creating a virtual device
The next step in testing a mobile application is creating a virtual device. You can simply achieve it just by specifying the operating system, device model, screen size, and other essential settings. Several mobile app testing tools online also provide cloud-based testing services. There isn’t any need for actual devices, these technologies can simplify the testing the program across many setups.
Step III: Launching the Emulator
After creating your virtual device to test your application, it’s time to test the application by launching the emulator. Select the virtual device in Android Studio or Apple Xcode and click the “Start” or ” Run” button. Your emulator will be launched. Once the emulator is initiated, programmers can run their apps to find and solve bugs and check for platform compatibility.
Step IV: Installing the application
You can either use the emulator’s built-in app store or drag and drop the program’s APK file onto the emulator window to install the application in the emulator. Testers can simulate user scenarios after installing the application to look for flaws. One can also use cloud-based emulators for testing mobile applications by logging into various mobile test platforms. By allowing groups to test programs across many platforms and operating systems, they can help save time and money.
Step V: Test and Debug the application
After installation, you can test the application on the emulator like on an actual device. To simulate swipes, touches, and other interactions, use the emulator’s controllers. The debugging tools provided by the emulator can be used to locate and fix any problems or faults.
Conclusion
Selecting the appropriate emulators and simulators is crucial to guarantee the smooth operation of your mobile applications or websites. Cloud-based testing solutions, on the other hand, can help you save time and money while delivering better test results. The premier cloud-testing platform, like Cloudy, can help to alleviate the limitations imposed by conventional emulators and simulators.
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