Test Your Android Application with Nativetap

Testing and debugging your applications is a prerequisite to building, and deploying, quality products to your current, and future, users. It is important to perform these functions on as many user devices, and with Android that can be a challenge given the sheer number of Android devices there are.

Nativetap provides Developers, Product Managers, QA Testers, and just about anyone the ability to test and debug Android applications remotely, thus expanding the reach of your application testing and support. The following will walk you through the steps to test your first Android application on Nativetap.

Setup Application for Testing

Once you have gotten started with an account on Nativetap, you’ll be logged into your Dashboard. From here you’ll see the project you setup as part of the onboarding, in this case “Example project” (very creative naming, if I do say so myself).

Selecting Example Project will display the dashboard for the project, which helps you keep track of some key statistics like Sessions with current build, Current build version, and Device model coverage by make.

Selecting the Current build version will give you the list of builds currently uploaded.

In this case, you don’t have any so select the Click or drop your APK to upload area (or drag-and-drop from your computer’s file manager) to add the one you want to test. In this case, we’re going to upload the XDA Labs app from our friends at XDA-Developers.

Begin Testing

Now that you have prepared your application for testing, the next step is to install the mobile application on your Android tablet or phone. Once installed, sign in with your credentials and you’ll get a screen with the available devices to test on:

For the purposes of this tutorial let’s use the LG G6 which was just added to our array of devices. Scrolling down you see it in the list and selecting it gives you the details of the device:

The next step is to select the app(s) to install for testing. We do that by tapping Select app to pre-install and then choosing it from the list:

Once the apps are chosen, select the back arrow at the top and then we’re ready to begin testing by selecting Start Session! Once we do that the session begins as Nativetap prepares a new device, installs the app, and then connects you to the stream:

Once the device has booted, you’ll be able to control it as if you were holding it in your hand.

You can interact in many ways with the remote device via your device’s screen in your hand. Below is the legend for tablet and phone:

Tablet view

Phone view

Once you are done with your testing session, you can tap the X in the top bar and your session will end. You can review the video of the session, along with log information on the Dashboard in the Sessions tab:

Selecting one of them will bring up the session, with the recorded video to be played along with performance playback and logcat for the session – all synchronized!

And that concludes our walkthrough! You can also view a video below which shows the actual interaction with the LG G6 on the device in hand. If you haven’t already, please Sign Up for a FREE trial and get started testing and debugging your Android Apps with Nativetap!