Recent research consistently points at a great future for the mobile application development arena. The apps sector is expected to continue to see explosive growth across the globe, with huge investments and research going into the industry. In this scenario every aspect associated with mobile apps receives instant attention. One such factor, coming to the forefront in recent times is the need for mobile application testing and debugging, which despite its importance, is not effectively done by most companies.

The foremost concern is that the current mobile debugging, testing and performance optimization space is broken. Many of the debugging and test automation tools available for desktop websites and PC apps simply do not exist for mobile. In addition, the mobile environment adds additional complexity through device fragmentation and the need to work on a myriad of end user conditions like different networks and locations. Adding to the complexity of the situation is user expectations - customers have developed an affinity towards mobile apps that won't crash, load quickly, and work on any device in any network. This challenging landscape was the driving force behind the creation of Appurify, with a mission to develop a next-generation mobile application life cycle management platform. The creators of Appurify had experienced the challenges of app testing as well as performance optimization at their previous jobs at Zynga, Amazon, and other companies ultimately leading to Manish Lachwani, CTO and Co-founder, and Jay Srinivasan, CEO and Co-founder starting the company.

Although Appurify is a relatively recent entrant in the mobile testing space, it has earned a reputation as a technology and product leader. "Our solutions are highly robust as compared to traditional manual mobile testing tools - users receive access to real devices, get opportunity to test real user conditions like network carrier and signal strength, receive robust support for automation, and receive actionable data that can be used to address mobile issues," says Srinivasan.

The products enabled by the Appurify Mobile Platform (AMP) include AMP Auto, AMP Web and AMP Manual and are used by a vast client list including Google, Yahoo, Dropbox and several others leading companies.

Four Core Elements Define Appurify

The company works on four core features which are; Automation and continuous integration (CI), access to real devices under real user conditions, actionable results and outputs and mobile debugging solution that share commonality with best of breed web and PC tools.

Automation and continuous integration

Mobile is too fragmented for manual testing to be practical or effective. The complexity of manual testing explodes as tests are run across a wide variety of devices, OS types, firmware levels, network conditions, etc. In addition, manual testing leads to unacceptable time requirements, costs, and the inability to capture bugs on developers. And, with the pace of development increasing due to sophisticated development tools, companies would need to further assess their manual Quality Analysis teams to improve quality. In this scenario, outsourcing doesn't seem to be an option as it enhances the complexity.

Appurify believes that automation is the best solution to the problem, and addresses the manual testing flaws by bringing developers the best of automation and continuous integration for mobile, by offering comprehensive support for all automated test frameworks.

Real devices in real world conditions

Given user expectations of an always-on, always-connected experience, where their apps would perform, mobile testing must run on real mobile devices running tests in real world conditions. Different carriers, network strength, OS versions, firmware, orientation and available memory can impact a mobile app's performance despite incorporating simulators or similar devices into testing. And, with mobiles developing fast, setting up an own device farm costs time and money.

Appurify's service offers frequently-updated device farms of phones and tablets, in every configuration that developers could think of. Appurify enables access to all iOS devices and a wide and ever-expanding range of Android devices along with API-based access to the different devices types and OS versions, thereby enabling exact configurations. The firm covers all mobile HTML5, native, Web and hybrid apps including streaming video apps and games. Appurify is an easy and powerful alternative to finding and buying devices, setting them up and maintaining them in a test farm.

Actionable results and outputs

Developers require actionable results. A testing solution needs to pinpoint what's not working, for instance, the crashes, the performance issues, or the long load times and go on to fix them.

Appurify offers real-time, actionable test outputs unavailable in other places. The detailed reports provide developers with rich, specific outputs including automated test results, UI screen casts, network captures with suggested optimizations, symbolicated crash reports, console logs, power consumption data, performance profiling and Xcode instruments. These reports from Appurify enable developers to quickly and efficiently optimize their app for supercharged performance.

Debugging on mobile

As the leader in mobile testing, Appurify is also focused on offering a debugging solution that is at par with debugging capabilities found on web and PC-centric solutions. Appurify offers as an industry first, a fully-functional app inspector for HTML5 and native apps on real devices, including runtime UIView and UIWebview editing, network debugging, timelines, breakpoints, on disk content audit, CPU profiling, OpenGL inspection and memory leak detection.

Emerging out of the rat race

Appurify enables the world's largest, enterprise grade, API accessible device farm with more than 1000 iOS and Android devices, and allows developers to test real user conditions such as network type, carrier, and signal strength. Another stand-out feature is the support offered to a range of automation frameworks, which allows developers to leverage their existing automation efforts on real devices.

For those relying on Manual QA , Appurify extends help in the form of AMP Manual, that captures video, network traffic, and crash logs for user's manual QA sessions.

Finally, and most importantly, there is a focus on getting actionable data from the tests. The challenge with most testing solutions is that despite problems being found, developers fail to gather adequate data to fix the issue. This concern is perfectly addressed at Appurify through their robust data capture tools.