Testing a website on earlier OS versions iPad / Android (and Windows)

Question

We're developing a mobile website, which we want to say will be accessible by users with Android & iPhones/iPads. I know websites are accessed via the browsers, of which there can be many on a phone, but we want to test them on older operating systems. We want to support a range of users, many without the latest versions of the operating systems.

So I am being asked what devices we need to go out and buy. Now I am assuming most come with the latest OS, and I'm pretty sure you cannot downgrade an OS on either Android or iPhone/iPad without "jailbreaking" the device. Surely there must be some other way of doing this?

How do people test their sites on older systems?

This would apply to Windows phones as well...

Answer 1

A service like this might actually save you some money in the long run:

http://www.browserstack.com/

Other than that, iOS has a significant market share in iOS7, a little in iOS6 and a negligible amount in lesser versions: https://developer.apple.com/support/appstore/

Covering the last two versions should be good enough for you.

Answer 2

Even if you could find emulators, why not just buy these older devices used? They could be had relatively cheaply and they would also give you the same performance characteristics, which would help in performance benchmarking.

Also, if you use a good mobile library, it should provide sufficient backwards compatibility -- not that this is a replacement for testing :)

Answer 3

You might look into Eclipse. I use this for developing my Android benchmarking apps, mainly via Linux, but some via Windows. It is capable of emulating a wide range of phone and tablet sizes, different CPUs and Android versions, including old ones. It is slow, but the emulated devices have browser and email apps. I don’t know how real the OSs are. It seems that there might be a version for Apple, but I have not studied the detail.

Answer 4

I've gone a long way to find a method, that, ultimately, doesn't work. But read on.

You can download old versions of WebKit. That's not the same as having the real phone, but can help you with some rendering issues.

To do this, you need to figure out which version do you need to test your device. Go search for devices' user agent strings. For example, this string:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_4_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12H321 Safari/600.1.4

Means that iOS 8.4.1 uses Webkit version 600.1.4.

Then you have to figure out which Webkit revision number corresponds to that version. WebKit tags list is helpful here. You can also try searching Google for webkit trac release 600.1.4. For my example, it's revision 171707.

Now go to http://nightly.webkit.org/builds/trunk/mac/1 and find the right (or closest possible) revision of WebKit, download and use it for your testing.

Now I've really found and downloaded it, it says that my new OS X is not supported for this old build. :(