[September 24, 2014]

Xamarin Announces Production Launch of Xamarin Test Cloud, the Most Comprehensive Mobile Quality Solution Available Today

Xamarin, the company with more than 750,000 mobile developers, today announced the availability of Xamarin Test Cloud, the most comprehensive mobile app quality service. Xamarin Test Cloud makes it fast and easy for mobile teams to automatically test their apps throughout the development process, ensuring that apps look, perform and behave well on over 1,000 real devices.

Mobile users expect apps to look good and function well on every device. With nearly 19,000 distinct Android devices, according to OpenSignal's latest fragmentation report, and over a dozen iOS devices, including the new iPhone (News - Alert) 6 models, ensuring proper behavior and great performance everywhere is a major challenge facing mobile developers today.

In a recent Xamarin survey, 77 percent of developers said that app quality is either "very important" or "mission critical" to their business. Yet the majority of these developers, over 80 percent, reported that they are testing apps manually, a time-consuming and error-prone process, typically performed on only a handful of devices.

Manual testing requires both the procurement of these devices and the support of ongoing personnel, which can involve major investment. As a result, most organizations either sacrifice device coverage and only manually test on a handful of devices, or sacrifice the breadth of their feature testing, especially with the fast release cycles of mobile development. These fast cycles make it nearly impossible to manually test every aspect of the app with every release.

Filling a Major Industry Gap

With app automation, mobile testing is performed continuously throughout the development cycle, across hundreds of devices, and results are viewed in minutes in a clear, actionable report. By plugging into Continuous Integration (CI) systems, Xamarin Test Cloud helps to ensure every release is a high quality release, free of regressions and bugs, which can lead to poor app ratings and low adoption.

Only 13 percent of respondents in Xamarin's survey use automated user interface testing. This gap between high interest in mobile quality and low usage of automation is in large part due to usability issues or lack of good automation support with the current solutions on the market. This gap is why Xamarin invested in Xamarin Test Cloud, the only mobile quality solution with powerful automation support that deeply integrates with the device cloud, resulting in high-fidelity, actionable test reporting, delivered quickly.

Solving the mobile quality problem in a fragmented consumer device and BYOD world is driving growt in the testing industry. IDC (News - Alert) forecasts that mobile applications will drive the worldwide testing services market to reach $37 billion by 2018. To capitalize on this opportunity, Xamarin Test Cloud is targeted at all mobile developers, not just those using Xamarin to build apps. The solution tests any native or hybrid iOS or Android (News - Alert) app written in any language.

Top features include:

• Broad device coverage: Test apps on more than 1,000 devices in the cloud, spanning different device platforms, operating system versions, form factors and hardware capabilities.
• Powerful automation: Automate apps in either C# or Ruby, using Calabash, the most widely used cross-platform test automation framework, created by Xamarin. Xamarin provides both the automation framework and the device cloud, which means perfect integration and continuous improvements in response to customer needs. Automate any user gesture, including taps, swipes, rotation, pan, pinch, as well as custom programmatic gestures.
• Actionable results: Xamarin Test Cloud provides beautiful, actionable reports with full resolution app screenshots of every test step in the user workflow, making it easy to spot visual problems and functional failures on a per-device basis or across groups of devices such as those sharing a specific form factor or operating system.
• Fast troubleshooting: Diagnosing issues is fast and easy with full access to device logs, stack traces and detailed hardware data.
• Memory and performance data: Xamarin Test Cloud collects performance data-memory usage, CPU time, test duration, and more-and displays this data graphically. Pinpoint bottlenecks and compare performance reports against previous test runs to find regressions in your app.
• Support for Continuous Integration: Xamarin Test Cloud is easily integrated into Continuous Integration (CI) environments to run tests and generate reports with every build. Xamarin Test Cloud works with Team Foundation System, Jenkins, TeamCity, and any other CI system that can run custom post-build commands.
• Access to mobile quality experts: Expert mobile automation engineers help customers automate apps, from providing coaching, all the way to building and executing a complete test suite as a service.

"We built Xamarin Test Cloud to address a major pain point in the delivery of mission-critical apps for enterprises and top mobile app companies," said Nat Friedman, co-founder and CEO of Xamarin. "With Xamarin Test Cloud, we are bringing Xamarin's established mobile expertise to this critical stage in the app development lifecycle to help all mobile developers have higher quality and more successful apps."

Top Mobile Companies Are Already Improving App Quality with Xamarin Test Cloud

"Xamarin Test Cloud helped us identify and fix critical device-specific issues in the latest release of Foursquare before we released," said Mike Singleton, software engineer at Foursquare.

"Xamarin Test Cloud is our path to a low maintenance, high quality and regression-free future. Not only is the product strikingly effective, but the team has been amazing - with their help we've seen immediate value from our investment. We're excited about where this can take our team and product," said Sean Beausoleil, Mailbox Engineering Lead at Dropbox.

"As a QA Engineer, I am really enjoying the Xamarin Test Cloud because it offers me a broad range of Android and iOS devices. It gives me the ability to have more test coverage and to discover issues sooner," said Derrick Lam, QA Engineer at Flipboard. "And what's particularly helpful is that Xamarin offers exceptional service and support that I can depend on every day."

"Xamarin Test Cloud helps us ensure that critical features of Expensify look and perform great on every Android device imaginable," said Tom Jacobs, software engineer at Expensify.

"Xamarin Test Cloud has helped us catch important bugs in challenging scenarios, and to ensure they never occur again," said Hamid Palo, Android team lead at Trello.

"Xamarin's Calabash framework, and their Xamarin Test Cloud, plays a fundamental role in our continued effort to maintain the highest possible quality of our products and also in securing a short time-to-market. Our test setup takes care of most of the tedious work doing regression tests and gives our team quick feedback, while helping us delivering new features at a fast predictive speed. Whenever we have encountered problems, the Xamarin service and support has been excellent," said Niels Frydenhold of eBay (News - Alert) Denmark.

Xamarin Test Cloud is immediately available at xamarin.com/test-cloud.

About Xamarin:

Xamarin is the new standard for enterprise mobile development and testing, and is used by over 750,000 developers from more than 100 Fortune 500 companies to accelerate the creation and testing of mission-critical consumer and enterprise apps. Xamarin's global customer base in 120 countries includes Dow Jones, Bosch, McKesson, Halliburton, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cognizant (News - Alert), GitHub, Rdio and WebMD. Xamarin is a Visionary in Gartner's 2014 Magic Quadrant report for Mobile Application Development Platforms. For more information, please visit: xamarin.com or follow us @xamarinhq.

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