Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Bugfender is pleased to announce that José Jeria Mena, developer of the game-changing fitness app Social Steps, has won our latest competition and is now the proud owner of an iPhone XS.

In our never-ending effort to help you track and destroy bugs, we’ve been listening to you. Based on your requests, we recently added a new feature to Bugfender: In-App Feedback. We’re pretty excited about it.

Since Black Friday first became a thing, roughly 15 years ago, practically every big name in digital retail has experienced some form of outage while trying to cope with its demands. Last year alone, international retailers Lowe’s, Debenhams and Game all suffered downtime at one point or another, bringing howls of complaint and derision from customers.

In 2017, a study found that 88% of people will abandon an app due to bugs and glitches. This startling stat demonstrates, with crystal clarity, the need for developers to make their product as clean as possible – with rigorous testing procedures to eliminate any errors. But what are the key steps that go into the testing regime? How can you, as the developer, give yourself the best possible chance of delivering an error-free app?

A few weeks ago we brought you a rundown of our five favourite automation testing tools for Android, and the response was overwhelming. So we’ve written a follow-up article, this time for iOS developers. The testing challenges vary slightly for Android and iOS testing. For one thing there are far more Android models out there than iOS, which means lots more potential bugs. Also, the two variants have their own default languages, which further complicates things.

We hope you’ve had a fantastic summer and are now enjoying the fall. After our release of Bugfender 2 earlier in the year, we’ve been fine tuning and adding many UI improvements. We’ve also been working on an improved filter view, enhancing issues and adding React Native support – all coming very soon, so watch this space.

When we think of other products in Bugfender’s space, we don’t really think of competitors; we think of alternatives. Because, being honest, Bugfender doesn’t really have any direct competitors. That sounds like cheesy marketing, right? Yep, we get that. And we don’t say it to be arrogant. We say it because Bugfender was built to provide a unique service in our space. In fact it’s designed to serve the specific needs of our parent company, Mobile Jazz.

Developers are a fussy bunch. We sweat on the tiniest details and every aspect of our product has to be just right. We don’t like entrusting our precious designs to anyone outside our inner circle. Yet we’re increasing delegating key quality assurance (QA) tasks to robots. The market for automated testing products is expected to be worth $20 billion by 2023 – three times as much as now.

Realistically speaking, how many times do you redownload an application that’s buggy? Unless it’s a hugely beneficial app, which one might begrudgingly use (off the top of my head, I can’t think of any that aren’t replaceable), users tend to just switch to an alternative app that does the same thing — sans bugs.

Solving a Rubik’s Cube. Skiing uphill. Completing Goldeneye on the N64 and looking suave when standing next to George Clooney. These are all things which are harder than marketing your product to developers. But, to be honest, we can’t think of too many more. We’ve tried everything to promote Bugfender to the development community. Being developers ourselves, we should have known how difficult this would be.