Most consumers don’t realize the amount of work that goes into building an app for a smartphone. The app has to be developed and tweaked for separate operating systems, but it doesn’t stop there. Each smartphone model and operating system update can potentially break an app’s ability to work.
Factor in all the various most popular phones, all the updates and all the apps a user is likely to download and you have an almost infinite number of combinations that developers need to test to ensure their app will work the way it’s supposed to on every phone. Considering how many apps are made or broken by user reviews in app stores, getting the details right the first time is essential.
However, spending the time and investing the money to buy the devices to run these tests is more expensive and time consuming than most app developers have the resources for.
This is where device farms come in. Also called device clouds, these “farms” are actual physical locations that house thousands of phones with different operating systems, phone models and OS versions. Instead of each app developer using their own resources to test their app, they can contract a device farm to do the testing for them. Since the device farms already own the phones, the cost of the testing for each individual app is much lower than it would be if the app developer invested in buying all the devices themselves. Developers simply find a device cloud they want to work with, upload their app for testing and choose which phones and operating systems they’d like the testing done for.
Ultimately the advent of device clouds has made it much easier for app developing businesses of all sizes to ensure a quality product at a reasonable price.
At Mobile Goods, we provide inventory to device farms for the necessary testing these developers need to launch their apps. If you’d like to learn more about our wholesale pricing on the top-selling smartphones in the industry for your device farm, contact us today.