Device Cloud

How to Build Your Own Android Device Cloud

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How to Build Your Own Android Device Cloud - Adventures in QA

In this post I will describe how to build your own Android device cloud in the office. You may think this is expensive and will take lots of time and work, but I promise it isn’t. After installing the device cloud you are able to control the real Android devices from your web browser no matter how far you are away from the real device. For all iOS testers and developers out there, I must say sorry, this post is only handling Android devices until know the tool I will use is not supporting iOS. Before I get started with the installation and setup I list shortly the hardware and software I used to setup the whole system.

Hardware and Software

Lets start with the software that is managing the Android devices. The software is called openstf, where STF stands for Smartphone Test Farm. The software is open source and is maintained by Simo Kinnunen and Günther Brunner. STF offers a plethora of really cool features like

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[Reblog] Android Smartphone Test Farm

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This post is a reblog from the XING developer blog. In the last week we had our quarterly HackWeek at XING. During the week I was working with some colleagues on a project to setup a Android Smartphone Test Farm based on openstf.io.

Excerpt from the original version:

Mobile is becoming increasingly important for companies that build web applications, and that also includes XING. Over 50% of our platform traffic comes from mobile devices. This in turn leads a constant increase in the complexity and amount of testing work required on mobile devices.

Our challenge

At the beginning of 2015 XING launched a new internal initiative called “Unleashing Mobile”. The idea behind it is to upscale mobile development from a single mobile team to multiple teams within the company. The previous team setup was simply not able to keep pace with the development speed of the web platform and bring more and more features to the Android, iOS and Windows Phone mobile platforms. As things stand, we have 5 mobile feature teams developing features like profile, jobs, content or messages. Besides that, each platform has a central core team divided up into a platform and framework sub-team. The core platform team works on features that haven’t yet been passed on to the domain teams. As well as building its own app features, the core team has adopted more of a consulting role in helping to keep the whole app consistent and clean. Another key task of the central core teams is to integrate all of the code changes every two weeks to make sure that a stable app version can be released to our users.

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