In this swift and consistently evolving age of Information Technology, it is vital to always look out for new tools and innovative methods to stay ahead in the competition especially, if you represent a highly competitive domain like software or game development.
The advent of cloud computing has put the focus on cross-platform mobile applications development and testing tools. Moving in the same direction, Microsoft acquired HockeyApp recently to bolster its mobile testing facility. Hockeyapp is one of the leading services for mobile crash analytics and app distribution. This service is used by developers who build apps on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Thus, with the help of this service, now Microsoft can offer a comprehensive range of mobile development possibilities, which would enable the developers and testers across the world to develop, distribute and beta-test mobile applications.
The Road Ahead:
The world of mobile apps and games has been experiencing an expansion of a humongous scale in the recent times, and this phenomenon will have an enormous impact on software development industry; almost like ‘big bang’ had in the universe. There’s going to be more, smaller teams of experts in development and testing.
No matter what size the competition take the shape of, still, developing and delivering good app or a game title is the final and the most important element of all that determines the success and failure of everyone competing and putting their stake in the process.
The struggle, however, continues even much after you have the product developed. You need to acquire users, and then you have to engage them and finally monetize your app/game title.
Here you need to get into the details and scrutinise the analytics. You would get thousands of queries and possible solutions, but this would further make the situation complex and challenging. This is where services like HockeyApp come into the picture.
A service like HockeyApp at the helm, you get fast and precise crash report after integrating it with your app. All these rich analysis and reports can be easily connected to your bug tracking systems as game QA testing tool. Once done with that, you can go for beta distribution and get the feedback with its built-in user feedback system. Besides these outstanding features, HockeyApp also provides a cross-platform support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Thus, developers can use all these platforms to develop and test great apps.
Healthy Competition:
We all would agree on one point that the biggest factor behind any kind of radical progress in any industry happens when there is a healthy competition among big players. What we experience today as a tremendous surge in mobile handset development industry has been made possible by the ever-soaring competition among the manufacturers.
This has opened up various avenues of growth for everyone and has empowered consumers/users of produce.
Similarly, the competition among mobile app makers has paved the path for many exciting developments like the expansion in game testing services. There has been healthy competition among such services, and the most common and noteworthy are between TestFlight and HockeyApp.
What’s In A Name?
Well, both essentially do the same thing, as they make it a lot easier for you to manage user testing of applications, but still, they are entirely different. The biggest difference is that TestFlight is limited to iOS; thus it has put limitations on testers, as they can install apps on iOS devices only.
On the other hand, HockeyApp can be used across all mobile OS platforms, which offers more opportunities for testers and it has been showing a huge impact on the mobile industry. But only time will tell which stays true to its claim.
For the time being, yes, the acquisition has been made, and it would take some time before the statistics would appear and then we can gauge the real impact of HockeyApp on mobile application development. Hopefully, with better-targeted reporting and precise elaboration, it will render help to the testers and publisher in the challenging times!
Article by,
Laxmikant B. Thipse
Founder & CEO
GameCloud Technologies Pvt Ltd
