Summary:
Mobile debugging is hardly proving successful on desktop
tools, as simulation of mobile user experiences and its related problems are
not possible with desktop screen as well as its pointing devices. Therefore,
remote debugging with real mobile devices offers the best-fit debugging
solutions.
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| Remote Debugging in Mobile |
Intro:
For mobile app developers, designing and programming user
experiences are challenging tasks at each stage of development. As, real UX is
only possible with real devices our attempts to simulate or emulate UX on our
desktop or laptop machines is a futile exercise.
Role of Simulators
& Emulators
However, practically testing our iOS or Android applications
on each real device is not a feasible option at all because of cost,
availability of devices, and time spend on testing. Therefore, most of mobile
application developers are using in-built simulators provided in SDK of the
respective OS platform. For instance, Apple offers official simulators in its
Xcode and you can easily use them on your Mac machine. You can test iPhone and
iPad screens with their hardware version and iOS version variations.
Similarly, Android provides emulators for Android devices
through ADT tools in Eclipse and in Android SDK. You can create Android Virtual
Device (AVD) for the choice of your real Android device to test and can beat
the huge fragmentation related issues on the Android platform. For rest of
other mobile platforms, you have to rely on their official simulators or
emulators such as BlackBerry Simulators, Windows Phone Emulators, Opera Mini
Emulators, etc.
Unfortunately, these desktop based simulators and emulators
are only providing limited help in debugging the mobile issues, as they never
allow us to physically tap or touch the screen with our big or small fingers or
thumbs. They never allow us to rotate or flip the devices to see accelerometer
effects in real life. These are some real problems for real UX, which can only be
addressed through real mobile devices.
Role of Remote
Testing
It is true that Apple is releasing new set of iOS devices
each year along with new version of iOS. At other hand, Android is infamous for
its hardware and software fragmentation due to myriad of device manufacturers
and backward version of Android OS in use in the market. Thus, one thing is
obvious neither any individual developer nor any company can afford to buy such
heap of devices with big budget. In due course, remote testing labs are
offering remote testing services at affordable rates, which are either a
community with a pool of devices or through a pool of some manufacturing
companies.
For instance, Samsung’s Remote Test Lab enables you to test
variety of Samsung devices using web-based interface to interact with real
physical devices and get feedback through remote monitoring software or screen
cast sent back to your machine. Keynote Mobile Testing and Open Device Lab are
other options to use for remote testing.
Remote Debugging
If you do not want to use remote testing lab option, for
many minor and real-time issues are arising frequently, during your course of
mobile app development, you have another option to connect your real mobile
devices with your development machines using USB like cable connector or
Bluetooth like wireless connection. Thus, you will inspect your source code
in-action on the real mobile device on your development machine and correct
them immediately.
For iOS devices, Apple has introduced Web Inspector tool in
Safari for devices that corresponds with desktop Safari browser and let you
perform your debugging tasks easily and in cheap ways. There are wide ranges of
developer tools in Web Inspector of Safari that enable you to tap even DOM
elements on your mobile devices and access DOM information on your desktop.
Similarly, for Android Google has introduced powerful Chrome
Developer Tools in its Chrome browsers of mobile as well as desktops. Thus, you
can leverage tons of debugging tools like DOM inspector, Network panel for
external resources, Source panel for JavaScript inspection as well as to set
breakpoints, and JavaScript console for entire set of JavaScript related
debugging.
Unfortunately, not all mobile application developers are
accustomed with such remote debugging tools for real world mobile user
experiences issues. Thus, they can’t address excellent user experiences in
their mobile app development projects. Fortunately, Lujayn has updated team of mobile
developers who can address your UX related issues beautifully with
cost-effective ways.
