Android and iPhone apps

Phone apps are recorded and run on real phones in a device lab, not on simulators, using your own build of the app.

Setting it up

1. In your project, press New platform and choose Android or iOS.
2. Choose a Device: the phone model and system version every recording and run will use.
3. On the platform, press Upload a build and choose the app file:
   • Android: an .apk
   • iPhone: an .ipa

Builds can be up to 512 MB. BitAssure reads the app's own name and identity from the file, so there is nothing else to type. Upload a new build whenever you release; the newest one is In use, and Use this switches back to an earlier one.

A recording or run is refused, with a sentence saying why, if the platform has no build. A phone is never reserved with nothing to put on it.

What the recorder can do on a phone

Everything in Recording a journey, plus:

• Swipes, Turn sideways, Pinch in and Pinch out
• Put the keyboard away, which does nothing when no keyboard is showing
• Choose an option on dropdowns and on iPhone selection wheels
• Set a date on Android's calendar and on iPhone date wheels
• Scroll until you see…, scrolling a screen at a time until the element appears, up to 15 screens
• Scroll inside a list or carousel, without moving the rest of the screen
• Accept the pop-up and Dismiss the pop-up for permission requests and the app's own alerts

Permission requests

By default a phone platform answers permission requests (location, camera, notifications) automatically, so they never get in the way of a journey. On an iPhone this also accepts the app's own pop-ups, because that is how Apple's tools work.

To test the requests themselves, switch off Answer permission requests automatically under the platform's device settings. The requests then appear, and your journey answers them with Accept the pop-up or Dismiss the pop-up.

Starting fresh

Before a run walks a scenario from its first step, it starts the app over: Android clears the app's data, and an iPhone closes and reopens it. So each journey begins the way a new customer would see it, unless it is set to start where another journey ends.

What phone time costs

	Cost
Recording	1 credit per minute while the recorder is open
A run	1 credit per minute of phone time, at most 15 minutes

A run's minutes count from when the phone is ready with your app installed until the run ends. The minute or more it takes the lab to hand over a phone and install the app is not charged. A run first holds the minutes it expects to need (half as long again as the last run of the same journey, or 10 minutes the first time) and gives back what it did not use. The journey page shows the expected cost before you press Run.

A run stops if the account's credits run out during it, the same way as when it reaches the 15-minute limit, keeping everything it measured.

Videos

Every phone run is recorded. The video arrives a minute or two after the run ends, lined up with the run's checks and trimmed to the run itself.

Limits

• An iPhone date picker shown as a calendar, rather than as wheels, cannot be set yet. If your app uses one, record typing the date into the field instead, where the field allows it.
• A run may take up to 15 minutes.