Smartwatch Testing

Smartwatch App Testing eBook

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My latest eBook Smartwatch App Testing is now available on leanpub.com. The book covers the smartwatch platforms Tizen OS, Pebble OS, watch OS and Android Wear. Next to the platforms the book describes the 4 key areas of smartwatch app testing, more than 45 testing ideas as well as a smartwatch app testing cheat sheet. Get … Read more

Smartwatch App Testing Ideas

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Smartwatch App Testing - Adventures in QA

In the previous posts you have read and hopefully learned something new about Tizen OS, watch OS, Pebble OS, Android Wear and what is important to know when start testing on one (or more) of those mobile platforms. Smartwatches may not be on everyone’s wrists yet, but that time can change very quickly in the next upcoming months and you must be prepared for the new way of interacting with your apps and devices. As you have seen in this series, smartwatches offer a complete new set of interactions, features and challenges for mobile testers and developers. The guys from gizmag did a great job in comparing the different smartwatch platforms from a software and hardware point of view and is a nice summary to the watches I used for this series.

However, the last post in the series is about smartwatch app testing ideas. Before I go into the smartwatch app testing ideas I want to briefly remind you about the 4 key areas of smartwatch app testing.

4 Key Areas of Smartwatch App Testing

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Smartwatch App Testing – Android Wear

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Android Wear Watch Lineup - Adventures in QA

This is the 4th and last post of my smartwatch app testing series. However, there will be one more post with lots of testing ideas coming next week, so stay tuned for that. In this post I will write about Android Wear and the important features to know about this platform. Android Wear, as the name already suggest is based on Android and is developed by Google. The platform was launched at the Google I/O 2014.

Android Wear is written in C, C++ and Java and is open source like Android. The latest version based on Android 5.1.1 aka Lollipop (Version 6.0.1 aka Marshmallow is currently in roll-out stage). Since Android Wear is open source many manufacturers already produced their own Wear based watches. Some of you might think, yet another fragmentation challenge is coming up, but this is not the case for Android Wear. Google build this platform in a way that the UI is not customizable like Android for smartphones. The main goal is to get a common look and feel as well as features on different watches, produced by various manufacturers. This is a great step for all people working with wearable apps based on Android Wear, because it downsizes the amount of work.

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Smartwatch App Testing – Pebble OS

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Pebble OS title - Adventures in QA

This is the third post of my smartwatch app testing series and in this post I will write about Pebble OS. In the previous posts I wrote about Tizen OS and watch OS. I think we all know the Pebble watches from their success on the Kickstarter campaign in 2012. In this campaign the company Pebble Technology Corporation raised more than $10 million dollar which was the best Kickstarter project at that time. With the raised money the company was able to produce the first Pebble watch. Since then, Pebble launched different versions of their smartwatches and the concept is different compared to Tizen, watch OS or Android Wear. Pebble’s characteristic is the low power e-ink display with either 2 or 64 colors. Right after the start of the first Pebble and the Pebble OS, this platform has become more and more attractive in the smartwatch business and therefore it is important to know the platform details in order to develop or to test for this system.

As a first starting point I recommend to take a look at the Pebble developer page, where all required information like the development SDK, tutorials, developer guide and the SDK documentation is listed. Also worth looking at are the mobile app SDKs for Android and iOS. Pebble watch apps or watch faces can either be written in C, Java or JavaScript.

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Smartwatch App Testing – watchOS

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watchOS title - Adventures in QA

This is the second post of my smartwatch app testing series. In this post I will write about Apple’s watchOS. Apple introduced watchOS together with the first Apple Watch in April 2015. WatchOS is already available in the second version watchOS 2. If you are new to this smartwatch app testing series, in the first post I wrote about Tizen OS and the Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch.

Together with the watchOS release, Apple also released the watchKit for developers, an SDK to develop apps for the smartwatch. Apple Watch apps can either be written in Objective-C or Swift, the new open source programming language from Apple. If you want to get started with watchOS, I recommend you to read the following links:

If you want to setup watchOS on your system, you can download the latest version from here. To get an overview about the architecture and the application life cycle of watchKit apps read this link.

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