There are a few differences between automated testing on real devices versus emulators. Majority of the companies consult automation testing companies for this purpose. Let’s do a comparison to evaluate the best way for your company to take with respect to your test automation practices.
Keeping this scenario in mind, we are presenting you the list of pro and cons of automated testing on real devices and emulators.
Benefits of Real Devices
- Testing actual world situations (network, location and weather etc.) are very simple and offer a deeper understanding of app functioning in various situations.
- Picture brightness in various lighting scenarios, screen resolution etc. can be very easily tested.
- Interoperability testing is much simpler with a real device.
- Device performance is quicker than conforming virtual frameworks. This means that assessing app performance will produce more accurate outcomes.
Drawbacks of Real Devices
- Conducting automated tests on actual devices is a relatively expensive affair, which would hinder projects that are restricted by time and budget
- Because of the wide range of platforms and devices, it is difficult to efficiently carry out testing in a limited time period
- In the app development phase for unit testing, actual devices are very difficult to link to the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in comparison with emulators, which would stifle the project.
Benefits of Emulators
- In the circumstances with extreme deadline pressure, attaining access to actual devices might be difficult. Therefore, emulators serve as a realistic alternative for testing in such scenarios.
- Budget constraints can influence the team’s decision to capitalize on actual devices. Virtual environments help to save time and money by permitting testers to continue with their tasks without spending on devices that may not be completely suitable for the specific tests they want to implement.
- Emulators are easily downloadable and open source.
- Web app testing can be done conveniently with the emulators.
Drawbacks of Emulators
- For protracted periods of evaluation, emulators are not suitable because protracted usage can be evaluated best on an actual device.
- The costs perhaps increase when your team notices that their emulator may be unsuited with certain app elements or apps. In such scenarios, they might require to invest in software patches to enable testing to continue.
- Perhaps the emulators support just a restricted number of mobile operating systems. This could render them useless in many scenarios.
After summarizing the pros and cons of everything, let us have a quick overview of some testing tools for the Android platform. This is the most famous mobile operating system these days and has an obvious option to consider.
MonkeyRunner: A famous tool where tests are developed in Python, MonkeyRunner can perform tests on both emulators and real devices. However, an important constraint in this tool is that you are required to write scripts for every device. Moreover, the test requires to be changed every time there’s a modification to the UI of the program being tested.
Ranorex: Can offer wide-ranging reports and pictures. However, the element search facility is a little inactive.
Robotium: Robotium is known as “Selenium for Android” which is a free UI testing tool. Nevertheless, you are required to allocate time with program source code to run your test automation suite. This is not completely suitable for interacting with system software.
Appium Automation framework: Utilizes the WebDriver interface to perform tests, and supports numerous programming languages and mobile web browser testing. Nevertheless, its reporting facility is not appropriately implemented.
In the light of the above discussion, QA teams are required to measure their own project necessities and decide what amalgamation of real devices and emulators would best suit their requirements for a given app, and what sacrifices they would be willing to make when selecting a test automation tool.
Author Bio
Ray Parker is a senior marketing consultant with a knack for writing about the latest news in tech, quality assurance, software development, and travel. With a decade of experience working in the tech industry, ray now dabbles out of his New York office.
