All these days we have been buying mobile phones from Amazon, but now you can get Mobile as a Service from Amazon Web Service.

I haven’t seen a technology that has been growing like AWS cloud.  You take a couple of weeks off from your work and come back, you will look totally outdated – such is the pace at which AWS cloud is introducing its services on cloud.

The latest one that got added is AWS Device Farm. One thing I really like about AWS is their product roadmap – they have done a pretty good job identifying the pain points where cloud can be maximum leveraged to not just solve the problem, but solve it in the most economic manner. AWS Device Farm is a cloud service that allows you to test  your mobile apps on a wide range of real mobile devices in the AWS cloud.

With the numerous amounts of mobile devices that are getting launched every day, mobile app developers face a huge challenge in testing and ensuring their apps are working across all the expected devices. There are 2 major challenges here,

  • Procuring and maintaining families of devices
  • Huge overhead in performing the testing across each of the devices and the lifecycle related to closing the issues.

AWS Device Farm precisely solves the above by providing a huge farm of devices from which one can pick and choose the devices they would like to use. You can get iPads, tablets, smartphones of various mobile vendors with varying versions. Click here to see the complete list of devices supported. I am sure this list will keep growing pretty fast. AWS Device Farm also supports a wide range of test frameworks like Appium, Calabash, Espresso, etc. Click here to see the complete list of frameworks supported.

With the combination of the device farm and test automation frameworks companies can now setup a complete mobile test lab that can provide faster turnaround of QA/Dev cycle time. You also get the advantage of testing the apps on real devices by loading the devices with the necessary load/apps and simulate real-time scenarios.

I also like the pricing offered for this service, you could either pay $0.17 per device per month or $250 per device for unlimited usage.

I am now curious to see what else is going to come “as a service”