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Testing on mobile is really hard

Earlier today I attended live advertisement, also known as "seminar", about Silk Mobile. It seemed OK, but does not really solve any tough problems. And it costs thousands of Euros per developer per year. By the way, do you know what is the easiest way to spot really expensive software? There is no price listed in their web page.

Way too much to buy

iOS needs OS X and developer license and comes in multiple different devices. Android emulator is dead slow and comes in billion different versions and devices. Windows Phone 8 emulator requires Windows 8.

So if you want to test your software, be it "native app" or some web site, be ready to buy lots of things.

Multiply that list with the number of developers you have and you'll end up with pretty huge bill.

Debugging and demoing is a nightmare

Let's say you are building a web site. If you want to debug some Javascript problem on iPhone, you need to use OS X for that. Android let's you debug on any operating system you want, you just need to spend half a day to download and set up the SDK. As far as I know, there is no way to do any remote debugging with Windows Phone. So hope you like doing lot's of alert()'s.

How about demoing weird bug to someone who is not sitting in the same building you are? Root/jailbreak your device, install VNC server. That is always fun. Especially if someone has not figured out how to jailbreak the iOS version you are using. Again, as far as I know, there is no way to do this on Windows Phone.

Android and billion different browsers

2.3 is still the most popular Android version. It comes with some version of the default browser. 4.0 and 4.1 come with different version and 4.2 comes with old Chrome (version 18). But if your site is run in WebView, 4.2 does not use Chrome, it uses the old browser. So that is at least 4 different browsers just on Android.

Well, at least I got a USB stick which doubles as always trendy mustache. Frank is back