The last week of May saw Apple drop the first public beta of iOS 11 (iOS 11 beta), now available for download. Apple plans on releasing the final version later this fall, rumored to be rolled out alongside the new iPhone 8 rolled out alongside the new iPhone 8. The iOS 11 beta includes a flock of UI refinements and other new features.
In this blog we will discuss about what developers can expect from the new update, which devices it will support and briefly about what does it mean for testers?
What’s new in iOS 11
The most significant changes have been brought in through several back-end enhancements to Siri, Messages, Photos, Apple Pay and other first party apps and services. Maps, for example, gets a new Do Not Disturb feature for safe driving and additional assets for indoor mapping for major malls and airports. Also, Siri gets an updated voice response system and other smart features. Most notably, on the UI front, the Control Center is now completely redesigned with a panel system flaunting a wide array of app and system controls.
Finally, it is worth noting that Apple has been up to new tricks that are proving a game changer due to upgraded Core ML for Machine learning and the new ARKit tools which boosts user experience as they would have plenty of augmented reality apps to browse through. This comes at a time when Apple has weighed heavily on the importance of artificial reality, the new Home-pod speakers to be launched later this year and machine learning.
So what does it mean for developers and testers around the world? Let’s dig a little deeper into their most promising new updates.
Apple embraces the augmented reality with ARKit for iOS
Apple had praises for Pokemon Go as it went on making changes to the company’s App Store. It also introduced a new set of APIs that will allow more developers to bring augmented reality apps to the iOS devices. AR had quite a year with endorsements and a healthy attitude from top tech companies. Facebook brought in the AR Camera platform at F8 and Google continued to update Tango as well as Google Lens, the new AR app. Greg Joswiak, Apple VP worldwide, recently referred to the ARKit Demo App called AR Measure that went viral earlier last week in social media platforms.
The ARKit is basically a solution for placing 3D objects realistically in a ‘real’ place, augmenting reality. And this is going to be a game changer. Take the furniture and interior décor industry for example, who have millions of images with 3D models of their assets saved up which can now be used to exploit this tool. There is a big demand and a mass reservoir of content to populate the AR universe, ready with 3D models. Apple has now opened up the path to millions of available portals with every physical outlet has a potential for layering with AR. This will comes as an upward mobility in skills for designers up the stack, visualizing the real world into a mobile devices. The focus of thinking on the application will also come in conjunction with other technologies like voice, photography and voice, without having to adapt to an existing AR system or building it from scratch.
Complete transformation for the iPad
Apple has taken transformative focus on iPad with the new iOS 11, with upgraded features and expanded functionality, leveraging the multitouch technology. The UX has been changed completely with main emphasis on multitasking, with more smooth and connected experience for iPad users, which has been a major complaint. For example, its drag and drop functionality comes with a new dock that allows you to move between apps, on the top of your full screen app. If you need to use two apps at the same time, you can still open them both using the split view feature, replace any of these apps by dragging an app from the dock and dropping it on the side you want and so on. Developers will have to embrace the new frameworks.
Devices getting iOS 11
Many iOS powered devices are getting iOS 11 and some will miss them. The latest iPhone’s and iPad’s are getting it including iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 5s, iPad Pro, iPad mini 4, iPad mini 3, iPad Air 2. Officially, Apple says that iOS 11 will be released in the fall “for iPhone 5s and later, all iPad Air and iPad Pro models, iPad 5th generation, iPad mini 2 and later and iPod touch 6th generation”, which means iPhone 5, iPad 4 and devices older are out.With no other iOS 10 releases in the future, it’s possible that iOS 10.3.3 will be the final update for iPhone 5.
Testing iOS 11
The iOS 11 beta has been open to developers since June 5. Beta testers who have signed up for the Apple’s beta testing program will receive the iOS 11 beta update over-the-air after installing the proper certificate on an iOS device. Needless to say, because the iOS 11 update is fairly transformative, Testers need to expect a few challenges when they test the beta.
A few mentioned below:
1. Battery Drain: The early Beta builds of iOS 11 is not meant to sustain an entire day of usage without heavy battery draining. Later builds will focus on the optimization of battery life, however now, keep a battery pack at hand.
2. Buggy Apps: Not all of the apps will work, or perform suboptimally. The iOS Beta is available to test just that, so that DevOp teams can get early access and optimize their apps so that they don’t misbehave later.
What Testers Can Do
Apple has opened their feedback option open to all to know more on the stability and reliability of the iOS 11 build. Along with the new Beta build, a new Feedback app is also installed into the phone. Users can sign in and get used to the interface, and provide bug reports to be sent to Apple. This helps everyone make the iOS devices more stable and then delve further into issues that may occur with third-party apps.
For more detailed information on the new features coming to iPhone and iPad this fall, Apple’s newsroom will take you through the important things you would want to know about the iOS 11 update. We will discuss the differences between iOS 10 and the new iOS 11 in a later blog. Be sure to check out MacRumors in the meantime to get a better idea about the iOS 11 Beta.
We are committed to keep you ahead of others: pCloudy is one of the fastest to release support of iOS 11 beta devices on cloud, as always
Apple has just released the iOS 11 public beta for their upcoming iOS 11 release expected soon. With the iOS 11 beta version released in the market, lots of enthusiastic Apple users are already moving to iOS 11.
Have you started thinking: is your IOS App compatible with this latest release?
pCloudy is happy to announce that we have released our support for iOS 11 on our cloud.pCloudy customers can use the iOS devices with iOS 11 for testing their applications either manual or automated way.
Manual Testing
You can access the IOS 11 device like any other IOS device and check the compatibility of your App
Automated Testing
If you are using Appium, we are happy to announce support of Appium 1.6 to take care the execution of Appium scripts on IOS 11.
pCloudy recommends all the customers to start testing their iOS apps on iOS11 to identify glitches.
Continuing with our endeavor to provide you a better experience, we are excited to announce our next big step.
Now, you will be able to access Mobile devices and Mobile networks from across different geographies. In the first phase, we are providing devices and mobile network from India, US and Philippines. We will add more locations very soon.
You can continue to use your existing credentials with the URL device.pcloudy.com to access all the devices from different locations.
Here are some of the changes you will notice –
Device Location filter in the Devices Tab
You can now select devices from different locations using the Device Location filter.
In the Instant Access page
In the Book your Device page
Device Location filter in the My App/Data Tab
NOTE: The My App/Data folder is specific to a device location. If you plan to use devices from different locations, make sure your app is uploaded in all Device locations.
Device Location filter in the Reports Tab
NOTE: The Storage folder is specific to a device location. If you’ve used devices from different locations, please select the corresponding location to view it’s reports.
Device Location filter in the Settings page
History section
Test Runs section
UDID
You also see a few changes once you access a device
Device Information
Installing an app
NOTE: Since My App/Data is specific to a device location, ensure that the installation file is uploaded to the respective location of the device.
pCloudy is happy to announce several exciting features as part of it’s latest release.
UI changes for improved user experience
More filter options to select devices on device search page. Device page options have been categorized for ease of access. Please check this video to see the changes.
Live View of Automation Runs
Now users can view the automation runs live on devices. Please check this video to see the changes.
The cloud-based on-demand plug and play ‘app certification platform’saves cost by nearly 50%.
A mobile solution provider, based out of Noida was faced with numerous challenges, such as, lack of- adequate device coverage and devices management, test apps in continuous integration mode, efficiency of mobile app testers, device sharing between teams, access of devices to geographically distributed devices, among others.
Keeping the organisation’s large scale of business in mind, pCloudy developed the most appropriate single platform hybrid solution to address all the above pain-points. This ‘Hybrid’ Lab included the conversion of the existing physical device to an on-premise mobile lab over cloud, thus enabling teams to access the devices from anywhere, anytime enabling them to schedule and book devices easily. Teams at the mobile solutions company could now schedule automated runs in a continuous integrated mode and also during regression tests.
In addition, pCloudy provided a single interface access to its public cloud for the Client’s team. Teams could now switch between public and on-premise clouds seamlessly, depending on the specific requirement, besides being able to access various devices during their release tests, thus finding a single-click platform for all the challenges it was faced with earlier.
Thus, pCloudy, the flagship product of Smart Software Testing Solutions Inc. in addition to business growth, brought about significant benefits to the mobile solution provider, much to the latter’s delight, including,
· 30% increase in productivity of teams
· 44% reduction in Test Cycle
· 25% increase in test coverage and reduction in production benefits
Another start-up Planet Gogo, in the mobile news space, funded by HT media recently, launched their Mobile App. To ensure success of their App, they wanted to test on variety of Low and medium budget smartphones. Moreover, they wanted to reproduce issues reported by their beta users. These issues were device specific where in pCloudy provided them the appropriate one-stop solution.
How the journey began?
Pankaj Goel, a technology Consultant who formerly worked at Oracle India, HCL Technologies and Adobe Systems along with Lalit Jain, also a consultant with experience in having worked with Wipro and Adobe Systems, co-founded CresTech Software Systems in 2006. The Company grew rapidly to become a trusted name in Independent QA and Testing space. Today it has 3 delivery centers at Noida, Bangalore and California and is a trusted partner of many Fortune 500 companies helping them accomplish their software quality management goals successfully.
Around 2009-10 the founding team conceptualized a ‘Commercial of the Shelf Solution’ called OpKey with Tool Agnostic Test Automation Platform. Very soon, this became a preferred ‘tool of choice’ for many customers, across the globe, who were looking to kick-start their Automation initiatives. In 2014,the three dreamers or the ‘tech nerds’ as they proudly call themselves – Lalit Jain (The Customer’s Voice), Pankaj Goel (The Open-eyed Dreamer) along with Avinash Tiwari (The Pragmatic Dreamer) decided to start another venture, with separate investment for OpKey and closed funding recently.
This new venture, Smart Software Testing Solutions Inc., was formed with the vision to create product and platforms for testing of Apps in a connected world. In line with their vision, they acquired, pCloudy Design Labs, a Bangalore based start-up that focused on Cloud Technology for a Mobile device. Today, pCloudy has been transformed as a Mobile App Testing platform and a separate entity in itself.
pCloudy is India’s first-of-its kind, plug and play app testing platform serving e-commerce, Mobile App based businesses, Mobile App Development companies, besides large enterprises. Besides serving the Indian market, its geographical expansion plans include catering to Australia, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.
Now, run your Espresso Scripts on hundreds of Mobile devices and build quality apps faster than ever.
Several Mobile Automation Frameworks like Robotium, Calabash, Appium, KIF & uiautomator have been developed in recent years. Among a few popular ones, Espresso is one of them.
You probably know, Espresso is a testing framework for Android apps. It is predominantly used by developers and testers for testing user interactions (UI) to ensure that users do not encounter crashes or unexpected results while using an app.
There are several benefits of using Espresso, the primary ones are:
It automatically synchronises test actions with the UI of the app being tested. Meaning? To improve the reliability of tests, it detects when the main thread is idle and runs the test commands at the appropriate time.
This capability also relieves you from having to add any timing workarounds, such as a sleep period in your test code.
Espresso has an API that is small, easy to learn and built on top of the Android instrumentation framework.
It also supports testing activities outside the app like camera, browser and dialer etc which Appium does not support.
However, when you have limited time and money it is a challenge to take full advantage of your Espresso scripts in improving the quality of your apps. Luckily, there are ways to overcome this.
Conventionally, you would spend a huge amount of money to purchase several Android devices, and spend endless hours running your scripts independently on each device. Today, thankfully you don’t have to do this anymore, there is good news. With the help of a cloud-based testing platform like pCloudy.com, you can run your scripts on hundreds on real mobile devices in parallel.
Yes, using pCloudy.com you can test your apps on any device of your choice and pay a just minimum price for the time you’ve used the device. You can not only save money, but you can also save your time by running your test scripts on multiple devices in parallel and get a detailed execution report.
Here’s how you can use Espresso on pCloudy devices:
Improve the quality of your iOS and Android apps by running your Calabash Test Scripts (Calabash Automation Testing) against real phones and tablets on pCloudy.com.
Along with Appium, Robotium and Espresso, you can use Calabash as well on pCloudy.com.
Calabash is a free open source framework for mobile automation testing. It is cross platform, supporting both iOS and Android. It consists of two libraries – calabash android and calabash iOS, which helps in writing tests in domain specific languages. Calabash consists of libraries that enable the test code to interact with apps. Each of these interactions consists of a number of end user actions like gestures, assertions or screenshots. The Tests can be written in simple, self-explanatory language that can be easily followed by even non-technical people.
Further, to increase the efficiency of testing and to improve the quality of your iOS and Android Apps and you can automate your Calabash Test Scripts against a wide range of real mobile devices on pCloudy.com.
Here’s how you can use Calabash on pCloudy devices:
“iOS 8 is the biggest iOS release ever — for developers and everyone else. But that wasn’t the goal. We simply set out to create the most natural experience. Each enhancement has a purpose. Every new feature deserves to be a new feature. Each function is more considered, each next step is more efficient. It all adds up to an even better experience — one that is pleasantly surprising at first and becomes utterly indispensable before you know it.”
What is new ?
Inter-App Communication
Inter-app communication means different things to different people. For some it’s the ability to push files from one app to another. For others it’s the ability to pull data into any field in any app. The core issue, however, is workflow. People just want an easier way to move their stuff around.
Touch ID Authentication
Touch ID is the name of Apple’s personal fingerprint identity sensor. It’s what currently lets you authenticate yourself to unlock your iPhone 5s and authorize iTunes and App Store purchases on your account.
Custom keyboards
After years of waiting, Apple has finally brought support for third-party keyboards to iOS. Inside iOS 8, keyboards like Swiftkey and Swype, which have enjoyed huge usage on Android, will have system-wide access to all apps and services on your iPhone and iPad. Swiftkey has confirmed it’s onboard, but if you don’t fancy that, you’ll still able to enjoy Apple’s new QuickType keyboard. The company says the improved keyboard learns from the way you type and text, offering a pick of suggestions for your next word based on the content of your message or the person you’re conversing with. Planning a meal with your friend or loved one? The keyboard will auto-populate words like “dinner” or “eat” as you type. At launch, QuickType will support 14 regions including the US, UK, Canada, Australian English, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (that includes Hong Kong and Taiwan), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Thai.
Family Sharing
New to iOS 8, a user can add six others as family members. Family members can share purchased apps, music, and books using the same credit card. iOS 8 can also automatically set up photo streams for all family members. Calendars may be synced between all members. Kids can also send iTunes download requests for apps, music, movies, and more to their parents provided this service is set up correctly.
Third-party widgets
iOS 7 split notifications and widgets apart, putting widgets in their own Today view, moving Weather to the Today Summary, and adding support for Calendar, Reminders, predictive location, and the Tomorrow Summary. Yet they were still limited to built-in apps and services.
iOS 8 and Extensibility take it even further, allowing App Store apps to offer up their own Today view widgets — helpful information status indicators, simple, interactive utilities, and ways to launch into the full app when and if needed — easily accessible from anywhere on the iPhone or iPad, informational and interactive.
What a new OS or device release means to the developers and Testers?
Update Your Device/OS Test Matrix
Maintaining Device /OS Test matrix is already a big challenge for organizations. It is always a big question that what device and OS combination should be included in the Test Matrix and what should be not. One way to set your Matrix in right direction is you can take the help of Google analytics that what devices your audience/users are coming from.Now each OS Device release we have to refresh this Matrix.
How should we proceed and what all areas we should focus more:-
Functional Testing
According to Apple’s developer site “iOS 8 includes over 4,000 new APIs that let you add amazing new features and capabilities to your apps. Deeper integration with iOS means you can extend the reach of your app content and functionality.”
Inter App communication
Test if your application is able to interact seamlessly with other apps and Able to transfer Data from one app to other.
Notification center
If your app is using Notification API it is properly updated in Notification center and your application is able to customize its Notifications in Device Notification center.
Touch ID Authentication
If Your Application is using Touch ID Authentication the is it working fine as per your implementation
A/B Testing
App Login with Touch ID
In iOS 8 developers can now use Touch ID to let their users log into their app. Typing in a password introduces a lot of friction into the signup flow, but Touch ID is also a new technology that isn’t perfect every time.
Just because Touch ID is available for app login, doesn’t mean it’s the best option for every user. Set up a simple A/B test to see how leading with one option vs. another impacts sign-ins and sign-ups. Depending on who your audience is and how they use your app, you may be surprised by the results.
Let’s face it; Touch ID doesn’t always work as promised. It’s important that your app respond before your users start to get frustrated and consider abandoning. Try testing different options for help text and UI elements to guide your users to a successful entry.
Extended Sharing Options
iOS 8 now lets developers share content from their apps with a new sharing options API. This release comes a big question: where will developers embed sharing actions? and what type of actions with sharing surface?
We recommend experimenting with different places in your app you can surface the option to share. Make sure you pick a consistent place that makes sense for users as part of their interaction flow. This can be hard to know for certain, so we recommend brainstorming some options with your team and testing as many as you can.
The types of actions you surface in your sharing options is also really important. Too many actions will clutter the experience and confuse people, threatening drop off. Think about the high-value actions you want your users to take. Start by highlighting only those. Then, progressively test into adding other actions based on user feedback and team ideas. If you start to see adding actions are negatively impacting your engagement, you know you might be going too far.
UI Testing
Remember these points before Testing
Size Class
With iOS 8, Apple is introducing “size classes”. Size classes have vertical and horizontal dimensions called “regular” and “compact”. The iPad in both portrait and landscape defaults to the regular size class in both horizontal and vertical directions. The iPhone in portrait defaults to compact size class for horizontal and regular size class for vertical. The iPhone in landscape defaults to compact size class for both horizontal and vertical.
Apple provides some automatic behaviors based on size classes. For example, if you rotate an iPhone app that uses standard components from portrait to landscape (from compact/regular to compact/compact) the navigation bar gets condensed and the status bar disappears entirely. That’s to maximize the content on a screen that’s suddenly gone from being tall to being very, very short — like a web page on Safari.
Developers are free to customize the layout for every orientation of every device they support as well. For example, they can have two buttons stacked on top of each other in portrait orientation to take advantage of the height, and those same buttons aligned side-by-side in landscape orientation to take advantage of the width. They’re the same controls, their position and other attributes simply change as the vertical size class changes.
Split view
Apple is also bringing split views to the iPhone. That means developers no longer have to maintain two separate interface hierarchies, one for iPad that contains split view, and one for iPhone that does not. Now they can maintain one hierarchy for both and the proper screens will all be rendered based on size class.
Changed UI API’s
With iOS 8 Release Apple has removed some of the UI API’s and a list of bug fixes in UI KIT made it very essential for user’s to test the UI thoroughly.
Orientation
You need to test the rendering of their application as per the changed classes and views
UX Testing
Enhanced Multitasking
iOS 8 comes with enhanced multitasking functionalities. Testing your app user experience with this enhanced Multitasking feature of iOS 8.
iOS 8 Touch ID authentications
Testing the user experience of your application with iOS 8 Touch ID authentications functionality.
Notification Center
How Your Application Notification pushed into Device Notification center or What happens when your Device is in Locked state etc.
Performance Testing
CPU usage by Your Application on this new OS and device.
App performance during interaction of one app with others.
Security Testing
Security will also be a major focus of this release. New iOS 8 features will make it even easier to keep track of all your passwords and make sure they are as secure as possible
