Posts tagged ‘Testing’
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.
Acquisition Expands Apkudo’s Wireless Device Testing and Certification Capabilities
November 25, 2013 – Baltimore, MD – Apkudo, the device quality assurance company, today announced the acquisition of Blue Potato, an innovative wireless device testing and certification company headquartered in San Diego, California.
Blue Potato currently provides technical expertise and testing services to help OEMs/ODMs and wireless operators bring their devices to market more quickly by leveraging their knowledge of North American lab approvals to navigate the end-to-end approval process. Its cost effective approach in providing functional device testing as a managed service allows OEMs and wireless operators to focus their efforts and resources on other critical areas.
The acquisition combines Blue Potato’s innovation in traditional testing and certification of all devices with Apkudo’s innovation in user experience testing and optimization. “The fit couldn’t be better,” stated Josh Matthews, Apkudo Co-Founder and CEO. “The joining of these two innovative companies greatly expands our offering and now allows an approach to traditional testing through the lens of experience testing.”
Apkudo Approved, a comprehensive user experience analytics suite, helps wireless operators and device manufacturers ensure the successful launch of their devices. An Apkudo Approved device provides a consistent, reliable, and well-characterized user experience.
“Device interoperability, testing and certification are constant challenges, especially for OEMs entering the U.S. market,” stated Stan Scheufler, COO of Blue Potato. “We are excited to join the Apkudo team, who share the same core principals of making it easier for OEMs and wireless operators of all sizes to offer the latest devices and deliver the best possible user experience to their subscribers.”
This is a guest blog by Bill Weinberg, Senior Executive, Mobile Practice Partner – The Olliance Group
Everyone agrees that testing software (and device testing too) is necessary and valuable. Everyone looks to testing to endow software and handsets with quality and reliability. But test engineering is often pure misery – in the quest for bugs and faults and other failures, developers are damned if they find bugs and more damned if they don’t.
Testing is a numbers game. There are probably graduate theses and tortured theorems that testify in detail as to why you can never totally test a piece of software. Similarly, there are ample handy heuristics for deciding how much testing for both software and devices is “enough”.
The mobile domain is not as unique in the testing universe – it shares much with sister disciplines on the desktop and other embedded verticals. But testing Android apps and hardware does present its own set of challenges, including:
- New Android platform releases every 3-4 months
- A vast array of published APIs
- Multiple implementation paths (high level and low, Dalvik-based and native, framework and extension)
- Platform fragmentation with behavior and performance difference across Android devices
It is the last two that are wreaking havoc with software quality and inducing the highest device return rates in the industry, especially for performance and user-experience of games and media-intensive apps on so-called “mass-market smartphones”.
In most software development scenarios, testers worry about coverage, focusing on the proportion of source or binary exercised by test suites and tools. Certification regimes aim high, target 80% or even 90% coverage, or wishfully even more. Real-world testers are usually happy to cover 50% of deployed code, and many code bases never get past 25% coverage.
Android apps are no exception.
The Android Device Jungle
But Android apps and devices also face different coverage challenges – wholesale device and application coverage. Keeping track of new Android device introduction, of handsets and tablets and other devices in volume shipment, and of legacy devices is a wicked paper chase. My friends at Apkudo invest heavily in tracking devices in the wild, and they reckon that as many as 300 different Android-based devices grace the pockets and purses and premises of the consuming public.
As with code under test, device test coverage is an 80:20 affair (or 70:30 or 60:40) – that is, 80% of the benefit comes from testing 20% of deployed kit, with the implication that 80% of bugs will surface through testing just 20% of the actual deployed device portfolio.
Do the math. If you are an application developer, in theory you will realize maximum return on your testing investment by exercising your app on 20% of deployed kit – 60 devices (gulp!). Given the dominance of a few models of current handsets from leading OEMs – HTC, Motorola and Samsung in particular – that number is realistically a more attainable dozen.
But the Android application developer community is as varied as they apps they produce. There are large ISVs, for whom incremental platform testing can be expensive, but within budget. There are smaller development houses and mobile enablement groups inside corporate IT departments, for whom test on a dozen hardware platforms is a burden, but not an unbearable one. Then there’s the population of individual developers, mythically laboring alone in attics and garages and basements, whose personal budgets are stretched by having to buy handsets and tablets they don’t actually use on a daily basis.
It turns out that developers of all types report that they test on about a half-dozen actual device models (stay tuned for a revealing survey by Apkudo on this very topic). Bare bones efforts beg and borrow kit from friends and family, but more substantial organizations also rely on 80:20 statistics.
The Long Tail of Testing
Quality of software and of devices is governed by rational statistics. Perception of this quality is anything but rational. Testing apps on the top dozen shipping devices and testing devices with the top 20 apps will yield statistically relevant results and deliver a quality user experience to a numerical majority of users.
But what about those unfortunate outliers? Unhappy apps purchasers and device owners may constitute a grumpy minority population – a mangy long tail of dissatisfaction – but they can exert a grossly disproportionate influence on the success of apps and devices. When those grumbling gamers and disillusioned down-loaders make their feelings known in widely read reviews and weigh-down rankings, developers and device OEMs can regret their reliance on majority platform rules.
The whip snap of this long tail is why I find Apkudo interesting. Their platform for Android app testing and services for device qualification give small developers, regional operators and upstart OEMs a fighting chance. Their goal of testing apps on EVERY Android device and of hammering devices with thousands of apps will reduce the incidence of nasty market surprises for these individuals and organizations. And even better, it will greatly improve the Android user experience for the rest of us.
-Bill Weinberg
Senior Executive, Mobile Practice Partner – The Olliance Group
Principal Consultant and Independent Analyst – Linux Pundit
@linuxpundit
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