Reliance Launches “Tested with Apkudo” Accessories

Reliance Launches First Suite of Apkudo Approved Accessories

Apkudo analyzes eight Nakamichi devices to ensure the best possible user experience 

September 3, 2014 – Baltimore, MD, and Hauppauge, NY – Apkudo, the mobile device quality assurance company, and Reliance Communications, one of the nation’s premier wireless distribution companies, today announced that Reliance has successfully launched the first group of “Tested with Apkudo” accessories. A total of eight Nakamichi Bluetooth™ speakers and headsets, as well as wired headsets underwent Apkudo’s rigorous and comprehensive testing process before being cleared for launch. Reliance is the exclusive distributor of Nakamichi headphones and portable Bluetooth speaker products in the US and Canada.

Apkudo surpasses simple functional testing to analyze wireless accessories from both a technical and user experience perspective to determine how devices will perform in real-world use cases. This allows service providers and distributors to manage their accessory portfolio based on the user experience delivered, in addition to technical specifications and pricing.

“The entire Apkudo Approved process has been extremely valuable,” said Cornelius VanGinhoven, Vice President of Product Management at Reliance Communications. “They reviewed the Nakamichi products down to the most granular detail, giving us extensive detailed reports that we could use with the manufacturer to make these great accessories even better.”

“An accessory that has the ‘Tested with Apkudo’ mark has gone through the most thorough and in-depth testing in the industry,” said Josh Matthews, co-founder and CEO of Apkudo. “Other accessory testing companies simply provides pass/fail results without any insights or actionable data to make accessories better.”

Reliance will begin offering Nakamichi headphones and speakers for sale to customers in September 2104.

About Reliance Communications
Reliance Communications is a one-stop service solution for the wireless industry, focusing on distribution, product development and reverse logistics. Reliance is a national distributor of the newest wireless devices and accessories and one of only three authorized distributors for Verizon Wireless in the US. Headquartered in Hauppauge, NY, Reliance has over 20 years of experience throughout the wireless ecosystem as a retailer, agent, master agent and distributer. For more information please visit our website http://www.reliance.us. 

 

Testing with Monkey

There’s no point sugar-coating it: testing is not exactly the most fun you can have with a computer. However, it’s an important part of providing a good user experience. Well-tested apps make their users happy, and happy users don’t post incomprehensible one-star reviews like these (taken from a recent sampling of high-ranking Market apps):

On Android, there are many options available for automated testing, starting with the Android Testing Fundamentals page, then moving on to beta testing and advanced automated testing packages like Robotium. But how many people actually use these tools? At Apkudo, we’re interested in questions like these, so we put up a short developer survey. The results are now in (stay tuned for a complete discussion of them in the next couple of weeks) but one number stuck out: 80% of app developers who responded to the survey do not do any form of automated testing.

We’ll go into the “why” of this number a little later: this post is about trying to improve upon the status quo, starting with Monkey: a simple and low-friction automated testing tool.

Introducing Android Monkey

Monkey is a testing utility which simply starts an Android application and sends it a pseudo-random stream of simulated touch and keyboard inputs. In other words, it acts like a monkey with a phone: randomly pressing keys and buttons and touching the screen.

Random key presses and screen touches — how does that help? Surprisingly enough, this simple technique is capable of finding a wide variety of code bugs and errors. It is, of course, by no means a replacement for automated testing, but it’s much better than nothing, and it requires very little manual intervention.

Monkey is installed on most Android devices. To try it out, connect a handset to your computer, and connect to a shell:

adb shell

From there, you can run Monkey on a single package using a command-line like this:

monkey -p com.android.browser 500

This command tells Monkey to start up the Android browser and send 500 pseudo-random events to it. If you run it, you will see Monkey interact with the browser — perhaps by scrolling the page, visiting a bookmark, or similar.

How it works

Behind the scenes, Monkey uses several private interfaces to communicate with three essential system services:

1. Package Manager: Monkey uses the package manager to get a list of Activities for a given Intent. This enables Monkey to randomly switch between Activities while testing an application.
2. Activity Manager: Monkey calls the very powerful setActivityController function on the Activity Manager. This effectively gives Monkey complete control over the activity life-cycle for the duration of the test.
3. Window Manager: Monkey calls a series of functions on the Window Manager to inject events into the application. This enables Monkey to simulate touches and key-presses. Because Monkey communicates at this level, there is no obvious difference between events which have arrived from Monkey and events which have arrived from an actual user. In fact, the distinction is so seamless that it is sometimes necessary to manually check who is in control — hence the famous isUserAMonkey() method in the Android

Monkey sends random events to any application you choose. In order to ensure that this doesn’t cause a security hole, Android uses several techniques to ensure that only monkey can send events, and only when the phone’s user is asking it to.

Firstly, Monkey itself can only be run by root, or by someone in the “shell” Unix group. Normally, only “adb shell” runs as the “shell group”. This means that the only way to run monkey is to do so through “adb shell”.

Secondly, the Monkey application, which is mostly written in Java, asks for two special manifest permissions. The first, SET_ACTIVITY_WATCHER, allows Monkey to take control of the activity life-cycle. The second, INJECT_EVENTS, allows Monkey to simulate touches and key presses. Importantly, no normal Android application can request these permissions — they are only granted to applications supplied with the Android system. So there is little danger of a rogue APK taking control of an Android device using Monkey.

Monkey events

What is an event? In Android, events are sent in  response to user input, or due to system events, such as power management. Monkey supports quite a few event types, but only three of them are of interest for automated testing:

• KeyEvent: these events are sent by the window manager in response to hardware button presses, and also presses on the keyboard — whether hardware, or on-screen.
• MotionEvent: sent by the window manager in response to presses on the touchscreen.
• FlipEvent: sent when the user flips out the hardware keyboard on the HTC Dream. On that device, this would imply an orientation change. Unfortunately, Monkey does not simulate orientation changes on other devices.

Conclusion

Monkey is by no means a replacement for automated testing, but it is a good start in the absence of anything else. Testing your app with Monkey is as simple as installing it an running a short command-line. Stay tuned for the next post in this series, which will explore the types of errors you can find with Monkey.

 

Nicholas Fitzroy-Dale
CTO