Smart phone for android development best practices? [closed]

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My company has just started to develop android apps that will run on android smart phones.

Would it be best to test on the most popular smart phones, i.e. Galaxy S4? Or is it just as good to test on any cheap chinese smart phones?

We would be ok to buy a S4, but cannot buy every smart device out there. We would however, try to keep the budget down as much as possible.

With the hardware spec's different on each smart device, we want to make sure it works for the most popular one.

Many thanks for any suggestions,

Answer 1

Go for a range of devices perhaps. Get a cheap china phone, get a HTC and a Samsung and that covers the widest variety of manufacturer OS I guess.

It's well worth noting that a Nexus device (e.g Nexus 4) will let you test the latest version of android (currently 4.3) at a reasonable price. You'll get updates fast so you'll be able to test the functionality straight away.

Also remember there is an emulator in the SDK that will help you see how it will look on different screen sizes, dpi, hardware etc.

From my limited experience HTC are the trickiest due to Sense getting its roots into everything.

There's no real perfect answer to this question. I don't see a need to buy 10 devices, but a few different brands and the emulator should keep you going initially. Also don't forget there's the community out there that will install your app and give you feedback. You could use XDA for this, or just feedback on the Play store. Give an incentive to the user to report on bugs / issues etc and they'll take care of a lot of that. As you know people are fast to tell you your app has issues!

Answer 2

Well as you might assume it is not that easy with Android programming. Of course it will be a good start if you get yourself one of the most popular devices, but if you really want to support as many devices as possible, I would go for at least 2-3 different devices (or even more). Try to cover as many variations as possible (API version, screen size, densities and so on).

I used to test my apps on all devices, I could get somehow (friends, family). And I think it was worth it.

Answer 3

For shortly answering this question: please type keywords: "best selling smartphone in 2012" into search engine, and you will get the answer: Galaxy S3.

For answering in detail, it's hard to answer this question because the answer of most popular smart device will change with time flies. There are same kind questions in stackoverflow.com, which were asked in 2012 How can I choose better Android developing phone? and 2010 Developing an Android smartphone app - on which devices would YOU suggest to check the app?.

Recommend you to think again what content of the app that your company want to propose to users and how to interact with and deliver to users. It's relative for what technology smartphones have and which version of Android start to support that you should follow.

For example, if you want to use Wi-Fi Direct technology for new connectivity experience in your app, you must choose Android 4.0 and later version since Android only support from 4.0 . Besides, NOT ALL smartphones with Android 4.0(and later version) support Wi-Fi Direct since manufacturers use their modified Android rom, which probably hide the function of Wi-Fi Direct and some wireless chips their embedded in devices are NOT FULLY SUPPORTED spec of Wi-Fi Direct standard.

Using cheaper devices may have some constraints you don't know until you test some apps on them. For example, like Nexus 7(2012, 32G capacity, 3G and wifi connectivity with Android 4.2 version), you couldn't use Audioeffect class in you app. If you use Audioeffect class, eclipse debugger will tell you error message about Nexus 7 doesn't support that during app runtime. This is from my development experience.

Wish you have nice journey in developing apps.