As we wrap up 2020, we are excited to look back and celebrate all the enhancements our product and development teams have delivered in the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud (RDC) to further simplify the user experience and help you accelerate mobile testing.
Maintaining an increasing stock of devices in your internal device labs can quickly get both time-consuming and expensive. With the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud, you can efficiently perform functional tests on native, web, and hybrid mobile applications across a broad range of real devices. Your teams can choose between our private and public cloud options which are compatible with popular mobile testing frameworks such as Appium, Espresso, and XCUITest, to meet your specific business needs.
Key Enhancements We Delivered in 2020
Camera Image Injection
If you are in the retail, banking, or other industries looking to address specific use cases such as scanning checks or QR codes or taking pictures for authentication purposes, our camera image injection feature, also known as ‘camera mocking,’ offers exactly that.
It simulates capturing a picture through your mobile device app and allows you to easily test an application’s camera-based functionality. This functionality is available for Live and Appium automated testing and is supported for all iOS and Android devices available on our Real Device Cloud.
To further advance your mobile testing efforts, we’ve recently added support for CameraX, the latest and easy-to-use API surface offered by Google for adding various camera-based features to apps.
Read more on how you can utilize the camera injection feature for your live and automated testing initiatives.
Same-day Support For Real Devices
To help you future-proof your apps, we had a streak of real device releases this year, offering same-day support (and in some cases even a day in advance!) for the newest generation of the iOS and Android devices on our public clouds in the U.S. and Europe.
This includes Android devices such as the Samsung Note 20, Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+, Google Pixel 5, and the new generation of iOS devices, including iPad Pro (2020), iPhone 12 (& Mini), and the iPhone 12 Pro (& Max).
Extensive Support for Frameworks and Operating Systems
Our development teams have continued to support the latest operating systems and frameworks for both emulators/simulators, as well as real devices, to help you keep up with your testing needs. This includes iOS 12.4, 13.2, 13.4 for iOS simulators, and same-day support for Android 11 and iOS 14 on our Real Device Cloud.
This year, we also announced our support for the latest Appium versions in our Real Device Cloud, beginning with Appium 1.17.1, followed by Appium 1.18.1, and wrapping with the latest version, Appium 1.19.
Zero-Downtime Deployment
In order to deliver value to our customers even faster and also provide fixes sooner, our development teams have worked especially hard to enable zero-downtime deployments in our Real Device Cloud. This means for several months already, we’ve released and deployed both in our U.S and European data centers seven times faster than before. This further shows that Sauce Labs is truly invested in providing a reliable mobile testing platform at the highest standard.
What’s Coming in 2021?
As we head into 2021 with a continued commitment to introduce user-centric features that optimize device/ OS coverage and advance QA/ Dev collaboration, our development teams are already working on some key enhancements.
You will soon hear more about how we are expanding our real device cloud capabilities by advancing the support for the XCUITest and Espresso native frameworks on the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud, and empowering native app developers to carry out their test automation efforts at scale.
See you in 2021. Happy Testing!
