How to achieve the best test device coverage

How do you reach your market?

How can you be sure that your product or service is reaching the right market or enough of your market?  It’s easy to make the assumption that a digital product can be accessed by anyone with a desktop, mobile or tablet device. In reality, the user experience and ease of access to your service may differ greatly depending on how much testing has been done across a range of devices.

Research from Device Atlas would indicate that to achieve 80%+ of UK mobile device users you would need to test on in excess of 18-20 different handsets from the iPhone 6s to the Samsung Galaxy A5.  That’s just hardware. Within these devices, there will be a large number of OS versions available that you would also need to include to be sure of comprehensive coverage.  That is a lot of testing to make sure that your digital product hits the market you need it to reach.

Test strategy

Testing the compatibility of that many handsets and OS versions is not practical in most cases, so you need to develop a test strategy for the selection of your target devices.  This will usually involve the evaluation of analytics and usage statistics for the target demographic.  For ongoing development, rotation of devices over the course of the product life cycle might allow you to reach a higher number over a period of time. Creating the right test approach is something that a test partner should be able to help you with.

Range of users

At Zoonou we maintain a test laboratory of nearly 300 physical devices, across iOS, Android, Windows and more.  Managing this device library is a challenge in itself, to ensure it’s representative of the broadest user base as possible.  While savvy users might be keen to upgrade as soon as new OS versions are released, less enthusiastic users with no storage left on their device may end up stuck on a historic version.

Rather than simply allowing devices to roll up to the latest OS version upon release, we keep each device locked to the software version it was launched on, then source new copies of the same device for subsequent version updates.

For example, we have several instances of the iPhone 6 in our lab on the following iOS versions:

• 8.0
• 9.3.5
• 10.0.1
• 10.3.3
• 11.x

Device selection

When releasing a new product, you may not have access to your own analytics to provide a breakdown of the most popular devices used by your current users.  At Zoonou, we can advise on which devices will be most beneficial to you and fully tailor an environment list for you and your product needs.

With our continuous research and monitoring of current device statistics, we’re confident that we can cover the user market you are targeting whether the UK, Europe or the US.

We cover the latest operating systems and display resolutions available, including beta versions of upcoming OS releases to ensure that you are always one step ahead in future proofing your product.

If you want to be sure that you’re developing digital products that engage with the right audiences or a big enough market, think about what that means in terms of desktop, mobile and tablet usage.

What certainties do you have that your website or app will work as you expect it to for your users?

For more advice or to download a copy of the range of devices available in our lab, please see our Device Lab page. For more details on our compatibility testing service please contact us at info@zoonou.com and one of our team will get back to you. If you’d like to get in touch about anything else, please head over to our Contact page.

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