I've never made an app before and am looking to get into it. I also need to upgrade my phone because it's really old. I've heard people say that it is best to test your app on stock android. But I really wanted to buy a Huawei, which might be running an older version of android not stock. What extra benefit would I get by spending the extra $500 to buy a Google Pixel phone for testing. Or is it fine, if I go ahead and test my app on a Huawei? What would be the pros and cons?
Android is an open-source operating system, which means companies can modify it to their liking. They do so by adding what’s known as a custom skin or user interface on top of the OS, which changes its look and feel as well as adds new features. These skins include Samsung Experience, HTC Sense, EMUI (Huawei), and OxygenOS (OnePlus), to name a few.
Some skins, like Huawei’s EMUI, change the overall Android experience quite a bit. For example, until EMUI 5.0 came along, owners of Huawei smartphones didn’t have an app drawer. All the apps installed on a device were placed on the home screen, just like on iPhones.
With stock Android, you get none of that — you only get the features developed by Google.
You can see the comparison of "Stock OS" and "Forked OS" here
https://www.androidauthority.com/what-is-stock-android-845627/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-stock-android/
With stock android, you get updates a little faster than other OS.
Coming to your scenario, you can even test an Android App without a physical device and by using Android's Emulator(Virtual Device) which has an Android Stock OS. You can select any version of Android(latest to old) and test your app there. If you are looking only for the purpose of testing I would not recommend you to buy PIXEL you can go ahead with your instincts.
People say it is best to test your app on stock android because the functionality you implement in pure android must work in the other OS as it is a layer on top of the stock OS but there are some chances(very few & negligible) that the functionality you implement in other OS might not work in stock OS. You can always use an Emulator for testing.
I am an Android developer. In my 5 years experience, I used both pixel and Oneplus, I did not find any advantages for stock android over Oneplus's Oxygen Os.
Related
I am building an application with React Native but the app not working well on a few android devices. So I need to see what's going wrong but I don't know how to set up an emulator for a specific device. Are these problems depends on phone's brand and model or it just depends on their android versions?
Its not really possible. There's two major problems:
Software. Real devices don't ship pure AOSP like runs on the emulator. They add patches and features and there's no way to know what they actually run.
Custom UIs. Many phones provide custom UIs like TouchWhiz and the like which can override Android behavior
Hardware. If your app depends on things that are very hardware specific, like GPS or Camera, they could have issues due to hardware bugs.
If you just want to emulate a specific OS version like KitKat, or specific low memory conditions its possible via emulator configuration. If you really need to test on a device, either buy one or use a service that allows you remote control over specific devices. Amazon has a nice device farm that you can rent over AWS.
One of the biggest challenges when developing for Android is the wide variety of devices and "optimizations" manufacturers make to their Android versions.
The Android emulator is based on AOSP (vanilla Android) and was only recently published with Google services included. This is the most clean version of Android. You can use the emulator to test UI scaling for different screen sizes but it will always behave like an AOSP Android. Google packs a bunch of hardware configurations into Android Studio which you can simply select when creating an virtual device. You can always create a custom hardware profile with custom screen size and resolution. Some manufacturers also change the DPI value of the OS causing the UI to be bigger or smaller, keep this in mind when creating a custom hardware configuration.
Further, you can use the emulator to test the default behaviour on different Android versions. Again, manufacturers change their Android usually causing slightly different behaviour.
I assume that your question is focussed on different behaviour of e.g. Samsung phones having crashes only occuring in Samsung phones (Samsung can be exchanged with any other brand here). Unfortunately, there is no simple way to test this but getting your hands on the faulty device. One option is to use a cloud based test lab (e.g. Firebase Test Lab, App Center or AWS device farm) to test your code on the faulty device or rent the device at a local shop. Most bigger cities have companies renting phones and tablets on a daily or weekly basis.
In the end you will need if statements checking for a specific device, manufacturer or Android version or any combination of them and doing something slightly different to fix the undesired behaviour.
I know that this is not the answer you are looking for, but it's the best I can offer. To tell a little tale of my worst experience: I had once a bug were calling a crypto function caused a kernel panic on HTC (?) phones. This means the user opened my app and the phone rebooted. I was required to implement the entire encryption logic again just for HTC with Android 6.0.
I am about to port my application on android. Since I am new to this system I would like to ask for tips on android phones for testing my app. The number of phones is pretty huge so it is pretty hard to choose the right one. Also I wasn't able to find some kind of official chart of system distribution.
I know that it really depends on hardware and how much my app demands from hardware. It is pretty basic app and I am able to run this app at 30fps on iPhone 4S.
I did some research and people are talking about the latest phones but I think that it is not necessary to buy the newest one. Also, is there option to buy for example tablet and emulate android devices on this tablet?
So my goal is to focus on devices people have the most.
Thank you for any advice.
You can run many of your tests on the Android emulator. Using it together
with the DDMS will allow you to simulate several real life situations
(arriving call, arriving sms, change position...)
You can use BlueStacks which is an emulator put on steroids.
TestFairy and UTest are awsome communities for crowd testing were you can test ~any device you can think of.
Still, it is a good idea, especially if you plan your run at Android to be long,
to maintain a small stash of real devices.
Which devices should you buy? Which OS version should they run?
The Android dashboard is the official source for answering some of these questions. It gives an
up to date statistics of worldwide distribution by OS version, svreen size/density and more:
OS Distribution
Screen type Distribution
So, true to July 2014 you would want devices running Jelly Bean, Gingerbread & ICS and you screens of types normal/hdpi, normal/xxhdpi and normal/xhdpi. This list can grow but even this will provide you with a good sample of the Android device ecosystem.
As for manufacturers, the picture is clear: Samsung is the winner. Exact number &
distributions are harder to find here, but a Google search might help.
If my memory serves me write some 65% of all Android devices are Samsungs made with
Galaxy S3 taking 15% (of ENTIRE Android market) and Galaxy S4 = 10%.
Device screen features:
Galaxy S2 is normal/hdpi
Galaxy S3 is normal/xhdpi
Galaxy S4/S5 is normal/xxhdpi
These will probably be your best bet. You will do smartly to install on them 2-3 different OS versions, at
minimum Jelly Bean and ICS.
The Android Development Tools in Eclipse and Android Studio both have emulators that can be used to emulate different devices, including tablets and phones. You don't need to buy anything to be able to test your app on an emulator. The emulators run on your computer.
For more information
As for what devices most people have, while I don't have official statistics, looking at my own applications' downloads, most people are using either a Nexus 4 or Nexus 5.
I am beginning Android app development and I would like to know which device would give me the most comprehensive testing environment. I would like my app to be compatible with the most number of devices without breaking the bank by buying a dozen devices. Just testing on the emulator is not an option because it runs at 1/10th of normal speed.
OS Version
Should I purchase a device with the most common OS? As of now, 2.2 is the most popular. Obviously, a 2.2 device wouldn't be able to test run an app made for 3.0. But is the reverse also true? If I buy a 3.0 device, would that allow me to test all lower versions?
Tablet or Phone
Given that my app won't be dealing with phone calls, should I be buying a phone or tablet? Are the two sufficiently the same except for resolution? Has your app ever worked on a tablet but failed on a phone? The Apple iPad has a neat emulation mode for iPhone apps. Is this feature also available on Android tablets?
Price is also a big consideration when choosing a tablet over a phone. I'm not going to sign up for another cellular plan, so most phones would have me fork over $500+. That would come out to be the same price as the Motorola Xoom. But arguably Android phones are much more popular than tablets, so a Xoom wouldn't let me see what most of my users would be seeing.
In general it's up to you, I suggest you Google Nexus S, because of NFC module in that phone (only that phone nowadays as I good know have NFC), besides that it has everything you need. Big plus for screen.
Android 3.0 is made generally for tablets but of course you can write application in 3.0 and run it on 2.2 or 2.3 just look for backward compatibility, and use reflection.
Also good to know that it does not depend of your phone which version you have it's up to SDK ver which you choose during creating project, in general you can set 7 as min SDK and test it on phone with 9.
If you are creating applications which requires a lot of custom drawing/animating such a game, then a slew of devices would be ideal to test against resolutions, DPI, RAM, CPU power, etc.
If you are using more of the native components then you do not have to worry as much about the different screen types and sizes as these tend to scale very well.
This question was brought up at GDC's Android Developer Day, you may be able to find the video online. Basically, it boiled down to trying to get one of each kind of device, low end, mid, high. It was also recommended that you built for the newest SDK, then start building against older ones, fixing, testing, rebuilding.
Therefore, I would personally recommend the Nexus S.
The company I work for does Android development on the original G1, HTC Hero, Samsung Epic 4G, and HTC Incredible.
My boss recently gave me an HTC Wildfire phone for doing an Android version of one of our mobile apps, which is all fine and good, except that the app requires API level 8 (ie Android 2.2), and the phone itself only has Android 2.1 installed. After much googling, I discovered that this phone does support Android 2.2, and carriers will be rolling out updates over the air for this model phone "in the near future".
Since I'm not entirely certain what our lazy carrier's definition of "near future" is, it would be nice if I could download images for particular releases and install them on my phone. Coming from the world of the iPhone, it seems that this should be something rather necessary in order to successfully develop an Android app.
Yet, it doesn't seem that Google offers any Android OS updates themselves. Have I no choice but to wait for the carrier to release an update?
Edit: Thanks for the suggestions regarding the emulator, but I'm asking about testing on hardware only. I already have a working 2.2 emulator image, but I need to test on hardware now, since the emulator does a very poor job of things like video playback and audio processing.
There's a few ways you can test your application on Android 2.2:
1) You can use the Emulator provided by Google in the SDK. It is possible to create a virtual machine of any version of Android with various hardware options. However, the emulator does have some limitations such as not supporting certain hardware options (such as bluetooth) and it's also dreadfully slow to boot.
2) If you have to use an actual phone with 2.2, you can root your phone and flash a custom ROM. I'm not particularly familiar with how to root the Wildfire, or what custom ROMs are available for that specific phone, but Cyanogen Mod has pretty good ROM support for HTC phones, as well as an active forum with tutorials.
No, it's not possible to download images before OTA. You could check CyanogemMod from time to time - they're working on Wildfire support. Also you could use an emulator.
If you are wanting to bounce around with newer versions, I recommend the Nexus One as a dev phone if you can get your hands on one. Or, if you can deal with the constraints, start with a built-in AVD emulator with API 8 until your phone gets the OTA update.
The Motorola Droid is also getting/has 2.2 on it. At least in the States, in seems that most of the phones on Verizon already have it (non-scientific, just from talking to people I know). So if that phone is available, it may be a decent choice.
I am an iphone application developer, all iphones have very similar Operating systems, and the size and everything is the same, so I don't need to create applications specific for each iphone.
But with android there are different phones, different sizes, So How can I possibly know that my app works, and looks fine on all these devices
I don't already own an android but I completed my first application using the simulator. Which android phone do u suggest for testing? I am an AT&T user and Iuse an iphone. Can I simply insert my sim-card in the new android to be able to test my app on the device?
The android virtual device lets you change the virtual hardware to match all of the current shipping phones. There are ways to receive device crash reports from a shipped application to help diagnose force closes or other grievous errors.
You need an unlocked phone to use another SIM card. The Nexus One is available unlocked out of the gate, and comes with an AT&T version. The only AT&T (as sold by AT&T) Android phone (Backflip) is stupidly crippled and should be avoided. You can also buy an Android Dev Phone, which is currently "middle of the pack" in terms of hardware. You can also easily find numerous other Android capable handsets - pick depending on your target market. Some phones are now old: for instance, the G1 is on its way out.
you won't need to worry about different screen size . take a look at Supporting Multiple Screen article . I'm not sure for the late ones because I'm also working with Android Emulator .
1 - Take a look at this Google IO session for load of tips on making your app work across devices. It's not that hard at all really
2 - I'd recommend the Nexus One if you need a phone just to develop on. It's representative of what you'll be seeing in devices in the coming years. If you want a current representative phone take a look at the HTC Legend (Mid-end) or the HTC Wildfire (Low-end). There's also the Droid and things like that but you can only get them on Verizon I think. I'm not too knowledgeable about availability in the US, I'm from the UK.