News

AWS Launches Device Farm Remote Access Preview

• By David Ramel
• 04/25/2016

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) beefed up the capabilities of its AWS Device Farm mobile app testing service with a new remote access beta offering.

"You can now use AWS Device Farm for manual tasks like debugging new functionality, running manual tests, and reproducing customer issues," AWS said in a blog post during its recent AWS Summit event in Chicago. "Simply choose an Android device and swipe, gesture, and interact with it from your Web browser." Support for iOS testing is planned for later this year.

The AWS Device Farm lets developers test their mobile and Web apps by trying out functionality on real devices hosted in the cloud, as do several other similar services.

"Remote access allows you to swipe, gesture, and interact with a device through your Web browser in real time in order to test functionality and reproduce customer issues," the project's developer guide states. "You interact with a specific device by creating a remote access session with that device."

The service records each session to provide videos for developers to review later, along with producing activity logs generated during each session.

"A session in Device Farm is a real-time interaction with an actual, physical device hosted in a Web browser," the documentation states. "A session displays the single device you select when you start the session. A user can start more than one session at a time with the total number of simultaneous devices limited by the number of device slots you have. You can purchase device slots based on the device family (for example, Android devices)."

Developers who sign up to use AWS Device Farm get a one-time free 250-minute trial, the company said, with regular pay-as-you-go pricing kicking in at 17 cents per minute.